Print Issue of September 28, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 51)

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

Michael Rakowitz makes his mark on the Museum of Contemporary Art with “Backstroke of the West.” 22 Not even arena gigs with his famous sister, comedian Amy Schumer, can tempt Jason Stein from his drive to make better jazz. 25

How Bill Morrison makes magic with found footage The Chicago-born filmmaker’s astonishing documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the story of one of the greatest film finds in history by using the discovery itself.

By J.R. JONES 13

2 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

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THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | S E P T E M B E R 2 8 , 2 01 7 | VO LU M E 4 6 , N U M B E R 5 1

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG, KATE SCHMIDT SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, OLIVER SAVA, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS MOLLY O’MERA ---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI STANULA VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda The Chicago Book Expo, the great documentary maker Albert Maysles’s final feature, an art show about vanning culture, and more recommended goings-on about town

CITY LIFE

MOVIES

Digging for old

Chicago-born filmmaker Bill Morrison’s astonishing documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the story of one of the greatest film finds in history by using the discovery itself.

BY J.R. JONES 13

8 Chicagoans How rock climbing became “moving meditation” for a local blind man 10 Joravsky | Politics CPS CEO Forrest Claypool questions the honesty of an alderman who dares call attention to classroom overcrowding.

12 Transportation Mormon missionaries use pedals to proselytize, with Jesus as their copilot.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 30 Shows of note Japanese Breakfast, Cardi B, Broken Social Scene, and more of the week’s best

FOOD & DRINK

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ARTS & CULTURE

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MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Jason Stein isn’t kidding around

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY LISA PREDKO. FOR MORE OF HER WORK, GO TO LISAPREDKO.COM. (ASSISTANTS: JACQUELINE AYALA, TOM MICHAS. RETOUCHING: TOM MICHAS)

23 Visual Art Carrie Mae Weems weaves herself into her new show at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art. 24 Movies Orientalism is alive and well in Stephen Frears’s Victoria & Abdul.

Not even arena gigs with his famous sister, comedian Amy Schumer, can tempt this Chicago bass clarinetist from his drive to make better jazz.

BY PETER MARGASAK 25

19 Architecture The best way to learn about the Chicago Architecture Biennial? Go straight to the source.

20 Theater What would Arthur Miller say about immigration?

21 Theater The Chicago International Latino Theater Festival makes its debut.

21 Dance Molly Shanahan speaks mysteriously in Blackbird’s Ventriloquy.

21 Dance The LatinxArts fest showcases works by three immigrant choreographers.

22 Visual Art “Backstroke of the West” exemplifies Michael Rakowitz’s desire to memorialize and acknowledge loss.

38 Restaurant review: Heritage Restaurant & Caviar Bar There’s more to the new Humboldt Park spot than big-ticket fish eggs.

41 Key Ingredient: Pork brains Bill Walker from the Kennison takes on a heady challenge.

CLASSIFIEDS

42 Jobs 42 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace 44 Straight Dope Has humankind really come up with only two main kinds of eating utensil?

45 Savage Love “What is the appropriate amount of side boob?” and more burning questions 46 Early Warnings Morrissey, Robert Plant & the Sensational Space Shifters, Twista, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf Joyride Records takes over the shuttered Permanent Records spot, and more music news.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

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Ages of Man ò TYLER CORE

THEATER More at chicagoreader.com/theater Ages of Man Theatre Above the R Law presents three Thornton Wilder one-acts about how children

relate to grown-ups. Wizened babies struggle to express complex thoughts while their adult caretakers can’t share simple ones, children playact themselves into understanding how much they need their parents, and teenagers realize the impossibility of walking in another’s shoes. This superb production moves nimbly from humor to heartbreak with spartan means, and the excellent cast juggle multiple roles effortlessly. Using little more than a patch of AstroTurf and a few chairs, they evoke entire worlds.

This is likely the best storefront play I’ve seen all year. Tony Lawry directed.

—DMITRY SAMAROV Through 10/8: FriSat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, McKaw Theater, 1439 W. Jarvis, 773-655-7197, theatreatl. org, $20.

Building the Wall Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Schenkkan seems to have forgotten the fundamentals of drama in creating his new, insistently unsuccessful two-hander. Gloria, a left-leaning African-American history professor with tepid authorial aspirations, meets Rick, a white, Trump-supporting former U.S. soldier convicted of a mass atrocity, for a death row interview. Despite potentially high stakes, their 75-minute encounter is inert. Gloria already knows the answers to nearly every question she poses, and Rick, who desperately wants his side of the story made known, has no reason to talk to an interviewer who continually points out how mistaken he is. In short, neither needs anything from the other, and we’re left with a predictable explication of the current divide between liberals and conservatives. Understandably, director Amy Szerlong can’t bring this Stage Left premiere to convincing life. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 10/22: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, stagelefttheatre.com, $32, $22 students and seniors.

For One The army of writers, R performers, technicians, and stage managers teaming up for (Re)discover

Theatre’s ambitious experiment turn a potentially alienating evening into an alluring, challenging, highly imaginative playground for grown-ups. Nine different ten-minute performances, most of which require viewer participation (in one, I was interviewed as a great artist), run concurrently in nine rooms of the Gunder Mansion. Audience members individually see five in an order determined by the drawing of cards. It sounds pretentious and uncomfortable (you’re the entire audience for each piece), but everything is expertly scaled for the intimate surroundings, and curator Janet Howe sets a good-humored tone by posting an absurdly long list of trigger warnings, including “coffee smells” and “assessing your feelings.” Best of all, you can play in five improv scenes without having to be funny. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 9/30: Wed-Fri 7:30 and 8:30 PM; Sat 6:30, 7:30, and 8:30 PM, North Lakeside Cultural Center, 6219 N. Sheridan, rediscovertheatre.com, $25-$30, sold out.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change Whoo boy, the relationship commentary in Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts’s 1996 off-Broadway musical has not aged gracefully, the references to smartphones shoehorned into this Quest Theatre Ensemble production notwithstanding. Women like to ask for directions while men don’t! Women like to cry at the movies while men don’t!

New parents are too busy to fuck! That’s to say nothing of director Laura Sturm’s vocally strong four-person cast, who have less schlocky material to work with in the more bittersweet second act about the long arc of marriage.

Liz Jarmer, Gavin Donnellan, Christian Aldridge, and Alys Dickerson make the most of the harmless, mostly toothless comedy. —DAN JAKES Through 10/29: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Blue Theatre, 1609 W. Gregory, 312-458-0895, questensemble.org. F The Legend of Georgia McBride This Chicago premiere of Matthew Lopez’s one-act follows a down-on-his-luck Elvis

impersonator’s metamorphosis from the King into a drag queen. Casey, played

by Nate Santana, experiences a perfect storm of life changes when he learns his rent check has bounced again, his wife is pregnant, and he’s losing his dive-bar Elvis gig to the owner’s drag-queen cousin. But pressure makes diamonds, and in this case it creates his alter ego, rhinestone cowgirl Georgia McBride.

As drag mentor Miss Tracy Mills, Sean Blake steals the show with a regal bearing, real-talk attitude, and quippy one-liners. Sidekick Rexy, played with chutzpah by Jeff Kurysz, delivers an emotionally charged monologue about drag as protest—“a raised fist inside a sequined glove”—but drag’s history and role in the LGBTQ+ community goes largely unexplored. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 10/22: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM (7:30 PM only 10/11), Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Sun 10/8, 7 PM, Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$76.

A New Brain William Finn is R better known for his other, more popular musicals (Falsettos, 25th Annual

Putnam County Spelling Bee), but there’s urgency, poignancy, and relentless honesty in this autobiographical 1998 piece, written with longtime collaborator James Lapine, about his 1992 diagnosis of an arteriovenous malformation in his brain and his subsequent surgery and recovery. The power of this riveting piece is only amplified in Theo Ubique’s intimate cabaret space at the No Exit Cafe, and director Fred Anzevino has packed his ensemble with energetic, near virtuosic performers—Chase Heinemann is especially winning as the fictionalized Finn (here Schwinn), though it’s newcomer Tyler Franklin, still only a junior at Columbia College, who steals the show. —JACK HELBIG Through 10/29: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, No Exit Cafe, 6970 N. Glenwood, 773743-3355, theo-u.com, $29-$54, $25-$50 students and seniors.

Orphée et Eurydice Orphée et Eurydice, Lyric Opera’s first-ever collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet, opened last weekend at a significant

moment for both companies—a day after the announcement that beginning in the fall of 2020, all Joffrey season performances will take place on the Lyric stage. Given that, it would be nice to be able to report that this production of the French version of Gluck’s opera about the mythic musician who braves hell to retrieve his dead wife—which employs the full Joffrey troupe—is a total success rather than the partially terrific experience it turned out to be.

Performances by all three vocal leads, but especially by tenor Dmitry Kolchak, as Orphée, are superb. (Sopranos Andrianna Chuchman and Lauren Snouffer are Eurydice and Amour.) So is the Lyric Opera chorus, though we don’t get to see them until they come out to take a bow. Director-designer-choreographer John Neumeier’s updated but earnestly melodramatic take on the 18th-century libretto, on the other hand, teeters at the edge of unintended camp—and occasionally falls right in. It doesn’t help that in the first two acts he’s working with a sometimes soporific (if lovely) score.

In the final act, when the music pushes into glorious high gear, the whole thing’s pretty much redeemed, although—spoiler alert—Neumeier’s Eurydice lives on only in the choreography she inspires.

—DEANNA ISAACS Through 10/15: Wed 9/27, 7:30 PM; Sun 10/1, 2 PM; Mon 10/9, 7:30 PM; Thu 10/12 and Sun 10/15, 2 PM, Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, 312827-5600, lyricopera.org, $20-$299.

Perfect Arrangement This R smart, engaging play by Atlanta writer Topher Payne, set in 1950s Wash-

ington, D.C., deftly juggles elements of farce, satire, and drama to focus on a dark chapter in American history: the antigay “lavender scare” that accompanied the McCarthy-era anticommunist “red scare.” Bob (Eric Lindahl), a State Department bureaucrat, and his schoolteacher boyfriend, Jim (Lane Anthony Flores), are posing as straight next-door neighbors. Jim is married to Bob’s secretary, Norma (Autumn Teague), and Bob is wed to Norma’s girlfriend, Millie (Riley Mondragon); the two couples live in adjoining apartments secretly linked by a walk-through closet (nice touch, that).

When Bob is tasked to lead a purge of homosexuals and other “deviants” from

A New Brain ò DEAN LA PRAIRIE

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

and reassuring—it’s OK to look like a hideous beast. Through 10/29: Sun 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773697-9693, theannoyance.com, $8.

Chicago Book Expo ò MARY CRYLEN the U.S. government, the foursome’s “perfect arrangement” begins to shred, thanks in part to resistance from a boldly bisexual State Department officer (the wonderful Kelli Harrington) targeted as a “security risk.” Pride Films and Plays’ excellent Chicago premiere, well directed by Derek Van Barham, deftly applies the style of slick 1950s Broadway comedies to content such plays would never have dared to address. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 10/22: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 10/18, 7:30 PM, the Broadway at Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, pridefilmsandplays.com, $10-$40.

R

Striking Out: A Gay Baseball Musical On the Annoyance’s main stage, directors Adam Levin and Ryan Ford run Take Me Out through The Twilight Zone. In a universe where all professional athletes are gay, straight Iowa farm boy Jimmy (Marco Braun) risks social stigma by pursuing his dream of playing for the Chicago Otters, a hard-partying gaggle of ebullient twinks in cutoffs. Both Braun and Olivia Nielsen (who plays Jimmy’s secret girlfriend) have vocal chops way above average for sketch-style musicals in comedy clubs, and Ford’s earwormy score is solid. This deep bench of naturally funny comedians—most of whom could read user agreements with good timing—shows that the straight-faced, big-hearted, absurdist tradition at the Annoyance is alive and well in the hands of a new generation of Chicago comics. —DAN JAKES Through 11/5: Sun 7:30 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $15, $12 students.

DANCE Dancebums The dancers in this collective are more active than most. They’re also part rock band, so they’re able to set the tone for their frantic, gyrating style. All are invited to get onstage and try to follow along. Fri 9/29, 10 PM, Phyllis’ Musical Inn, 1800 W. Division, 773-486-9862.

COMEDY Monster Club Mary, a fifth-grader who winds up in detention, invents a host of imaginary monster friends, played by puppets. The show is both spoooooky

My Suicide Note This dark comedy

by Collin Williams revolves around a suicide note he wrote, and the circumstances that led him to the mind-set that killing himself was the only way out. Fri 9/29-Sat 9/30, 8 PM, the WIP Theater, 6670 N. Northwest Hwy., 312-692-9327, wiptheater.com, $15 in advance, $20 at the door.

The Rocky Balboa Picture Show Corn Productions members present a musical mashup of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Rocky, set in a bumfuck region of Russia where characters from both universes collide. There will be a prizefight, of course. Through 10/28: Thu-Sat, 8 PM; also Tue 10/31, 8 PM, Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, 773-6501331, cornservatory.org, $10 on Thu, $15 on Fri and Sat.

LIT & LECTURES Chicago Book Expo The annual R expo turns six, and this year it has a sibling: the first Chicago Architecture

Book Festival. Speakers highlight the smaller pieces of Chicago that make it an architectural marvel—bascule bridges, street photography, etc—and there’s a host of 80 book vendors. Sun 10/1, noon5 PM, Columbia College Chicago, 1104 S. Wabash, 312-369-7569.

architectural challenge in one of Chicago’s neighborhoods, part of the ongoing series 50 Designers/50 Wards. Through 3/1/18. Mon-Sun 9 AM-9 PM. Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan, 312-922-3432, architecture.org.

Sight Six This event, part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, showcases graphic design posters created by artists throughout the city. Through 9/30.

Mon-Thu 8 AM-7 PM, Fri 8 AM-6 PM, Sat 9 AM-6 PM, Sun 10 AM-6 PM. Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312744-6630, chicagoculturalcenter.org.

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Battle of the Sexes The 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King was a made-for-TV carnival, broadcast on ABC and viewed by some 90 million people, which makes it excellent material for a movie (even as the war rages on). Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, best known for Little Miss Sunshine (2006), meticulously re-create the match, but British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) puts so little thought into his minor characters that the era’s

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Il Boom This snappy Italian satire (1963), somewhat reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, lampoons the rampant consumerism that accompanied the country’s economic boom in the late 50s and early 60s. A high-living businessman (the energetic Alberto Sordi), desperate to pay his debts, secures a private business meeting with the dowager wife (Elena Nicolai) of a rich manufacturer, fearing that she wants only his organ.

He’s right, but it’s not the organ he suspected: at their meeting she offers him a handsome sum for his left eye, to be used in a cornea transplant for her husband. Vittorio De Sica directed, more than a decade removed from his heartfelt neorealist classics The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. In Italian with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 88 min. Fri 9/29, 6 PM; Sat 9/30, 7:45 PM; Sun 10/1, 3:30 PM; Mon 10/2, 6 PM; Tue 10/3, 8:15 PM; Wed 10/4, 8:30 PM; and Thu 10/5, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

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In Transit The great documentary R maker Albert Maysles (Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) died one

week before the premiere of this final feature at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, and like much of his best work it demon-

Naomi Duguid Cookbook author R Duguid, winner of two James Beard awards, signs books at this multicourse feast prepared by Income Tax chef Ryan Henderson, who’ll draw on recipes and wine recommendations from her Taste of Persia. Fri 9/29, 5 PM, Income Tax, 5959 N. Broadway, 773-8979165, incometaxbar.com, $45.

Netflix and Kill At a special Halloween edition of the late-night series 26, performers receive a letter of the alphabet at random, choose a word that starts with it, then write, dance, do stand-up, or, really, whatever they’d like—so long as it’s terrifying! Through 10/28: Sat 10:30 PM, Pride Arts Center, 4147 N. Broadway, 1-800-737-0984, pridefilmsandplays. com, $10.

VISUAL ARTS Ass Grass or Gas Artists Josue Pellot and Robin Dluzen, both active in Chicago’s vanning culture, curated this exhibit featuring vintage prints and patterns found on vintage vans. Through 10/14.

Sat noon-4 PM or by appointment. Tiger Strikes Asteroid, 319 N. Albany, tigerstrikesasteroid.com.

Between States There are 50 nifty United States, 50 nifty Chicago wards, and 50 nifty local designers each tackling an

In Transit gender politics seem grossly oversimplified. Dayton and Faris treat the event more as a personal story in which King anguishes over her bisexuality, with Andrea Riseborough as a golden-maned hairdresser who beds the tennis star and schools her in the virtue of self-acceptance. As King and Riggs, Emma Stone and Steve Carell are both excellent, which makes you wish Beaufoy had done more with the story’s most complicated friendship—between the two wellmatched athletes. With Sarah Silverman, Alan Cumming, and Elisabeth Shue.

—J.R. JONES PG-13, 121 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Crown Village 18, Lake, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, 600 N. Michigan.

strates a profound desire to observe and understand others. Maysles and his four codirectors took round trips on the Empire Builder train, which runs between Chicago and Seattle, to document the various activities of the passengers, many of whom tell their stories on camera. The nonlinear, dreamlike narrative focuses on internal as much as external journeys, with strangers connecting across racial, cultural, and generational divides to express wisdom or compassion. Near the end of the film, one passenger who recently suffered a heart attack remarks, “Maybe I don’t want to die without having a good look at the world.” His words seem like a comment from the filmmaker, who not only got a good look but was gracious enough to share it. —LEAH PICKETT µ

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

Cheers to outdoor fun

SANS stingers

AGENDA

Unrest B 76 min. Fri 9/29, 2 PM; Sat 9/30, 5:15 PM; Sun 10/1, 2 PM; Mon 10/2, 6 PM; Wed 10/4, 8:15 PM; and Thu 10/5, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Signature Move Local filmmaker Jennifer Reeder made a name for herself in the mid-90s playing White Trash Girl, sort of a female Kid Rock with superpowers, in a series of snarky low-budget videos; two decades later that persona has aged about as well as Stepin Fetchit’s, but Reeder has evolved, checking off as many identity boxes as possible with this tale of a Pakistani-American woman (Fawzia Mirza) falling in love with a Mexican-American woman (Sari Sanchez). As in many other gay rom-coms, the lovers must triumph against homophobia rooted in family and ethnicity, personified here by the Pakistani-American woman’s recently widowed, endlessly fussing mother (veteran Indian actress Shabana Azmi). This plays like a hipster version of a Nia Vardalos comedy, with a subplot involving lucha libre wrestling and a handful of scenes shot at the Hideout (hilariously miscast here as a gay hookup bar with a steamy dance floor). In English and subtitled Spanish and Urdu. —J.R. JONES 80 min. Azmi attends the screening on Thursday, September 28, part of the Chicago South Asian Film Festival; for a full schedule visit csaff.org. Thu 9/28, 7 PM, and Fri 9/29-Thu 10/5, 2 and 7 PM. Music Box.

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Super Dark Times Kevin Phillips explains that he set his debut feature in 1995 to examine the “undercurrent of darkness” in white teenage boys that fed the Columbine High School massacre four years later. That’s an admirable goal, abetted by his sure feel for adolescence in the Clinton years (the main characters are introduced in a basement rec room, watching VHS porn, as they commiserate over girls’ photos in the yearbook).

Unfortunately the story—about an accidental killing that the boys cover up, and the growing division between them—is such an indie-cinema chestnut that its famil-

iarity tends to overshadow Phillips’s careful cultural notation, and the movie drifts further into mystery convention as it goes along. Owen Campbell and Charlie Tahan are persuasively ordinary as the two pals central to the action, though the plot supposes a level of psychopathology neither of them can quite summon. For a more acute and terrifying response to Columbine, see Ben Coccio’s forgotten indie Zero Day (2003). —J.R. JONES 102 min. Facets Cinematheque.

The Unknown Girl A rare dud from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, the Belgian brothers whose low-key dramas about the disadvantaged show how greed and need force us to betray each other and ourselves. The protagonist (Adèle Haenel), a young, proudly unemotional doctor, is shaken to her core after learning from police that a frantic woman she refused to admit to her clinic after closing time was murdered shortly thereafter. Attacks of conscience are common in the Dardennes’ movies, but in this case we’re asked to believe that guilt would motivate the doctor to sacrifice a high-paying new job, open a practice on the wrong side of town, and venture into increasingly dangerous situations to determine the dead woman’s identity so she can be buried under her true name.

Haenel’s deadpan performance makes this a tough sell, leaving only the common mechanisms of a suspense plot to move the drama forward. With Dardennes regulars Jérémie Renier and Olivier Gourmet, the latter especially scary. In French with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 106 min. Fri 9/29, 6 PM; Sat 9/30, 3 PM; Sun 10/1, 5:15 PM; Mon 10/2, 7:45 PM; Tue 10/3, 6 PM; Wed 10/4, 6 PM; and Thu 10/5, 7:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Unrest This documentary provides an overview of the debilitating illness myalgic encephalomyelitis (better known as chronic fatigue syndrome), charting its history, analyzing various treatment methods,

and presenting portraits of people in different countries who suffer from the disease. Director Jennifer Brea has ME herself, and she structures the film around footage from her own video diaries; these excerpts—which recount her physical deterioration, years spent in bed, and fitfully successful efforts to overcome the disease—personalize the medical lesson and give the film an emotional core. Sad as Brea’s story can be, some of the other portraits are even sadder: one young English woman whom Brea meets online describes being bedridden for over a decade. The most difficult aspect of having ME, the film argues, is lying idle while life passes you by. —BEN SACHS 97 min. Fri 9/29-Thu 10/5. Facets Cinematheque.

Woodshock Fashion-designing sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy break into moviemaking with this gauzy art film, described in press notes as “a hypnotic exploration of isolation, paranoia, and grief that exists in a dream-world all its own.”

Kirsten Dunst stars as a woman who loses her mother to terminal illness, in an early sequence so hushed, formally conceived, and devoid of concrete character detail that it leaves little emotional residue. Employed at a cannabis dispensary in Oregon, the heartsick young woman starts messing around with a mind-shattering cannabinoid solution that causes her to commune with nature among the giant redwoods and, back home, walk around in her underwear a lot.

Orbiting her like vague moons are three young men—her concerned husband (Joe Cole), her cagey boss at the dispensary (Pilou Asbaek of A Hijacking), and an adenoidal young admirer (Jack Kilmer)—most of whom seemed as puzzled by the situation as I was. —J.R. JONES R, 101 min. Landmark’s Century Centre.

SPECIAL EVENTS An Evening With Chicago Film Masters Three features by Chicago-connected directors, all appearing in person: from 1972, Gary Sherman’s Death Line (8 PM); from 1998, John McNaughton’s Wild Things (10 PM); and from 2016, Gary Michael Schultz’s Vincent ‘N Roxxy (midnight). The program begins with a selection of shorts.

Fri 9/29, 7:30 PM. Davis.

South Asian Film Festival Presented by the Chicago South Asian Arts Council, this four-day festival includes screenings, panel discussions, musical performances, and industry workshops. Screenings take place at Music Box (see Signature Move, above) DePaul University, Showplace ICON, AMC Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook; for a full schedule visit csaff.org. Fri 9/29-Sun 10/1. v

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SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE Chicagoans

The blind climber

ò ISA GIALLORENZO

Shawn Sturges, 31

Street View

DIY B-boy

VISUAL ARTIST AND B-BOY Miles Jackson was leaving work sporting an updated version of the normcore trend: minimal pieces—but worn with zero irony and somehow befitting the Moe Howard-ish bowl haircut. Inspired by 1970s breakdancers and workwear uniforms, Jackson’s style is practical yet intentional; he tailored his wool military pants for a skinnier fit and fastened the oversize waist with a cord for a deconstructed edge. “It’s more fresh,” he says, “to make something yourself, to alter details, than it is to buy something brand name.”

—ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on Giallorenzo’s blog chicagolooks.blogspot.com.

WHEN I WAS about 15, I wanted to get contacts. The doctor noticed that I had diminished vision in my left eye, but I had never noticed it because my right eye was compensating. I went to a neuro-ophthalmologist, and he couldn’t figure it out, and then over the next couple years, I started losing the sight in my right eye really quickly. It wasn’t until a doctor did a genetic test on my parents that they found out I had Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy. People with Leber’s usually have peripheral sight, but I’m atypical. I’m completely blind.

After I lost my sight, I shut out the world. I was angry at the people around me, because they had their vision and I didn’t. I was very angry at my mother, since it was a genetic trait she passed on.

I shut myself in my room and didn’t want to be around people. After about a year of being alone and hating the world, I got therapy and got the services I needed and learned how to get around using a long white cane. I learned a text-to-speech program so I could use the Internet and Microsoft Office. I went to a rehab center to learn daily living skills. Now I travel around the city by myself. I take buses and trains everywhere.

I get accused a lot of faking blindness, because my navigation skills are so good and I walk at a pretty decent pace. Just about a month ago, I was walking to my apartment, and this woman wasn’t paying attention, and my cane bumped her, and

“Climbing became a moving meditation thing for me,” Sturges says. “For that brief moment, nothing else in the world exists.” ò KATHRINE SCHLEICHER

she started screaming at me and accusing me of not being blind. But I’ll take the shitty things people say to me, because I’m not gonna be cooped up in my house.

After I lost my sight, I did various things to try to help navigate the world of blindness and help me with the depression I faced. I did martial arts, I did a little bit of wakeboarding, I tried skydiving a couple times. But I never really found any sport that could help me be as creative and athletic as I was before I lost my sight.

So when I was introduced to climbing, I instantly fell in love with it. I climb two to four days a week, and my brother Toby at Genesis X Fitness is my personal trainer.

Climbing became a moving meditation thing for me. You have to be really focused.

For that brief moment, nothing else in the world exists. No matter what I face during the day—if people were rude to me or if I was trying to cross busy intersections and

cars weren’t paying attention—climbing is a way that I can escape those everyday stresses. I’m gonna be doing it the rest of my life.

When I climb indoors, the person who belays me uses a radio system to give me direction, tell me where my next handholds are. They might say, “Your next hold is at one o’clock, right hand.” Outdoors is a lot easier, because anything I can find and hold on to, I’m using. I did my first multipitch climb in Eldorado Canyon [in Colorado] a few weeks ago, and that was like 200 feet off the ground. It wasn’t scary. It felt freeing. Feeling the sun, hearing the birds squawking. Hearing the river running down below. That was the highest vertically I’ve ever been. If it didn’t bother me being 200 feet up, I don’t think it’ll bother me being 400, 500, 600. I think if you can see, being that high up is a lot more intimidating. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 28

FRIDAY 29

SATURDAY 30

SUNDAY 1

MONDAY 2

TUESDAY 3

WEDNESDAY 4

Pre -Vi nylette Society: An Inte rnati onal Showcas e of Women S ign Pa inte rs It’s the final night of this exhibit of text-based signs on wood, vinyl, glass, and other nontraditional surfaces. Closing reception 6 PM. Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted, #100, chicagoartdepartment. org. F

i Funny Ha-Ha Claire Zulkey’s regular reading and stand-up series carries a Halloween theme this time around: “The Witching Hour.”

Guests include Sarah Hollenbeck, co-owner of Women & Children First; proceeds go to child literacy program Sit! Stay!

Read! 6:30-8 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $10.

Ý Th e Upside Down The Stranger Things-themed pop-up shutters after tonight at the behest of Netflix lawyers. DJ Heaven Malone returns for one last trip into the sensory deprivation tank.

Avoid lines by coming out at noon, when the club opens. 9 PM-3 AM, Emporium Popups, 2367 N. Milwaukee, emporiumchicago.com/popups. F

 Ha lloween Canine Cruise Mercury, Chicago’s Skyline Cruiseline, invites people who stock Instagram feeds with dogs in sweaters to score pooch Halloween costumes and motorboat around the lake. Meet at 112 E. Upper Wacker. 10:15 AM, mercurycruises.com, $35 for adults; $14 for kids five-15; $8 for dogs; children under five ride free.

* Chicago Podcast Festival Dewax your ears for major podcasting throughout Chicago at this weeklong festival. Tonight, get sucked into an Internet vortex with Rabbit Hole: A Wikipedia Podcast, in which the hosts pick a topic at random and click on as many related links as possible. 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $10-$15.

( Fleet Foxes The band’s first album in six years contains the smooth harmonies of its predecessors. The Reader’s Peter Margasak writes, “There are moments [on CrackUp that are so undeniably gorgeous and moving that I don’t care about the passages infected by excess.” 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, $36-$50.50.

M Dylan Mo ra n The Irish comic can sometimes come off as smug, but that’s just the demeanor he adopts when letting the audience in on a secret. Hear his thoughts on Trump and long-term relationships at his only Chicago stop. 8 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773935-6860, athenaeumtheatre. com, $43.55.

8 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

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CPS CEO Forrest Claypool essentially called Tenth Ward alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza a liar during a closed-door meeting about school finances. ò ASHLEE REZIN/SUN-TIMES; BRIAN JACKSON/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

POLITICS

Forrest chump

Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool questions the honesty of an alderman who dared call attention to classroom overcrowding.

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D E N T A L S A L O N . C O M 10 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

O

h, to have been a fly on the wall at the recent closed-door City Hall meeting in which Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool pretty much called Tenth Ward alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza a liar.

If nothing else, Claypool’s response to Garza’s questions on classroom overcrowding tells us all what the mayor’s handpicked school boss expects from aldermen. You know—shut up and stand in line. Sort of what Donald Trump wants black athletes to do.

Before I dig into the details, let me point out that this Claypool controversy is different from the other Claypool controversy that came to light last week thanks to the Sun-Times.

In that Claypool controversy, Sun-Times reporters Lauren FitzPatrick and Dan Mihalopoulos revealed Claypool had gone through six lawyers before he found one will-

ing to rule that it wasn’t a conflict of interest to hire lawyers from the firm he once worked for.

In contrast, President Nixon only had to go through two lawyers before he found one willing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor back in 1973. Worse than Nixon—hey, maybe that’s a slogan Rahm can use to lure Amazon to town. That and several hundred million dollars in handouts.

Back to the Garza-Claypool showdown.

On hand for the closed-door September 14 meeting with Claypool were nine aldermen of the more or less independent persuasion, including Garza, John Arena, George Cardenas, Ricardo Muñoz, and Scott Waguespack.

Claypool was there to answer questions about school finances. Despite the recent state school funding agreement, it’s not clear CPS has enough money to get through the year without more cuts.

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ELKHATIB LAW, LLC

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

According to several accounts I heard, the ruckus began after Muñoz asked Claypool if state aid would help cover last year’s cuts.

Claypool said there weren’t that many cuts.

Garza called bullshit. Schools in her ward, she said, lost about 20 teaching positions, and there are classes with at least 40 students.

(CPS set the maximum class size at 28 for kindergarten and first, second, and third grades; classrooms for grades four through eight are supposed to have no more than 31 students.)

“That’s when Claypool said, ‘That’s not true, I don’t believe you,’” says Garza, whose account was backed by Waguespack.

Everyone in the room was shocked to hear a mayoral appointee essentially call an alderman a liar. It violates the general order of things for an alderman to be so blatantly disrespected, even by an aide who’s close to the mayor. (Claypool and Rahm have been friends since their days as aides on Senator Paul Simon’s 1984 campaign.)

“I was so pissed. I wanted to go south-side on him. I really did,” Garza says. “I wanted to tell him to go f—well, you know what I wanted to tell him.”

Instead she tried to take the high road. “I said, ‘Excuse me. Not true? What? Would I make this up? Come to my ward—I’ll show you,’” Garza says.

After that, the meeting sort of fell apart, Garza says. “Alderman Cardenas said, ‘You need to visit the schools.’ And Muñoz walked out. And I walked out. ’Cause he wasn’t giving us any information.”

In the aftermath, most aldermen—at least the ones I talked to—agree that Claypool would never talk so disrespectfully to a male alderman. Or an alderman who, like Claypool, comes from a more affluent north-side ward.

In contrast, Garza’s southeast-side ward just across the border from Indiana is largely made up of poor and and working-class people who don’t have a lot of clout at City Hall. Especially these days.

Also, there’s a good chance Claypool and Emanuel will be asking the City Council to eventually approve a tax hike to fund CPS. That means the aldermen can expect to hear from angry constituents about rising property tax bills. When voters want to blow off steam about rising taxes, they don’t call appointees like Claypool. They call their local alderman.

“Claypool’s going to ask us to take the hard vote and he’s calling me a liar?” Garza says.

“He’s so arrogant.”

As word of the exchange spread, people rushed to Garza’s defense. Martin Ritter of the

est. 1967

!

“I was so pissed. I wanted to go south-side on him.

I really did. I wanted to tell him to go f—well, you know what I wanted to tell him.”

—Tenth Ward alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza

Chicago Teachers Union tweeted: “Finished Ozarks on Netflix. Pretty good.”

My bad—wrong tweet from Marty. He actually tweeted: “Hey, @claypoolcps, don’t mess with @ssadlowskigarza. You will get dunked on bruh.”

Soon 24th Ward alderman Michael Scott tweeted the hashtag “#dunkedonbruh.”

Many aldermen probably wish Garza had gone “south-side” on Claypool. In the high school cafeteria-like setting that is City Hall, Garza’s way more popular than Claypool, who’s like the annoying apple polisher who sucks up to the teacher by telling her she looks lovely in her new dress. His brownnosing capabilities may explain why Mayors Daley and Emanuel appointed him to positions of power.

Having called around to schools in the area, Garza says she stands by her comment to Claypool. She says there are two classes with at least 40 students and many others with more than 30. All in all, it’s a lot more students per classroom than at, oh, Francis Parker, the private school in Lincoln Park where Claypool sends one of his three children.

Claypool didn’t respond to a request for comment. But I think the only way to really settle this beef is for him to get out of his downtown office and tour the classrooms of the southeast side with Garza. I mean, Forrest, if you’re gonna call Garza out, you’ve got to back it up.

Then, for goodness’ sake, start treating kids on the southeast side as if they go to Francis Parker. v

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Amanda Aamodt and Emily McCrary by Logan Square’s Mormon church ò JOHN GREENFIELD

CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

They’re on a mission from God Mormon missionaries use pedals to proselytize, with Jesus as their copilot.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

S

ome folks ride bicycles in Chicago for exercise, while others do it to reduce their carbon footprint. Amanda Aamodt and Emily McCrary pedal for a higher purpose; biking, they say, is the most affordable and efficient way to spread their faith to others around the city.

For decades it’s been common to encounter young male missionaries—called “elders,” ironically enough—dressed in white shortsleeved shirts and black slacks with neckties and name tags, navigating Chicago in pairs on cycles. Female missionaries (aka “sisters”) on bikes is a more recent phenomenon.

“It’s kind of a strange sight to see two cleancut young women riding bikes in skirts in Chicago,” says Aamodt and McCrary’s supervisor, elder Mark Bingham. “It’s very hard for them to be ladylike and modest—and yet they are. And they’re undaunted by the summer rain and the traffic. . . . We know that they are protected by the hand of the Almighty in their valiant effort and are blessed as they make great personal sacrifice to declare the news of the restored gospel.”

After connecting with Aamodt, McCrary, and Bingham through Alex Wilson, director of the youth education center West Town Bikes, who recently helped them out with some new rides and repairs, I caught up with them last week at Logan Square’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The young women discussed the advantages of using bikes for their ministry, as well as the dangers and annoyances they face while pedaling through the city.

Bingham, 69, a farmer by trade, temporarily moved to Chicago in July with his wife, Sherry, a piano teacher, from Honeyville, Utah, near the Idaho border, after they were “called” by their faith to mentor young missionaries. “We love rubbing shoulders with these folks,” he says. “It makes us feel young.”

12 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Aamodt, a 20-year-old from Pleasant Grove, Utah, south of Salt Lake City, has been on a mission in Chicago for 16 months. McCrary, 19, grew up in Rocklin, California, and came to Chicago about a month ago.

Nowadays men can go on a mission beginning at age 18, and their tour of duty lasts two years. Women must be at least 19, and their mission lasts 18 months. “We’re dedicating that time 100 percent to serving God and sharing the message of the joy that He has brought into our lives with others,” Aamodt says.

Worldwide there are 422 missions and more than 70,000 missionaries, according to LDS leadership. The Illinois Chicago Mission has at least 130 young missionaries and ten older mentors at any one time, with new ones coming in every six weeks. According to Bingham, about 18 to 25 people are baptized into the Mormon faith in the Chicago area each month due to outreach by missionaries.

Aamodt and McCrary cover a long, narrow stretch of territory bounded by Laramie, Belmont, Fullerton, and Lake Michigan, and they share an apartment in Hermosa. Like all Mormon missionaries, they’re volunteers and are responsible for paying for their own living expenses. The two women were assigned to minister primarily to Latino residents within their district, although neither one previously spoke Spanish. After six weeks of language-immersion classes at the Missionary Training Center at Brigham Young University, extensive Bible study in Spanish, and frequent interactions with native speakers, they say they’re now fluent.

Missionaries using bikes to make the rounds is a matter of pragmatism, Bingham says.

“Sometimes Sherry and I follow them to appointments, and we have to park blocks away, but they can chain up right in front.” Other benefits include avoiding traffic, and not having to pay for gas, parking, or tickets, which is

crucial for young people on a fixed budget.

Another major perk is that biking exposes the missionaries to more residents and encourages spontaneous interactions with potential converts. “In a car you’re kind of closed off, but on a bike you’re out with the people,” McCrary says.

Helmets are mandatory, and the missionaries get bike-safety training before they get rolling. Still, crashes aren’t uncommon.

During one particularly unlucky week, four members of the Illinois Chicago Mission were involved in separate collisions. The day before my interview with the sisters, a driver struck one of their fellow female missionaries in suburban Westchester, Bingham says. The young woman is OK, but her bike was totaled.

“We’ve had some crashes, but no tragedies,” Bingham says. “I think the policy would be carefully studied if there was a tragedy. The biggest problem is the drivers: doors flying open and drivers who are turning and don’t see bikes.”

Aamodt says she’s never worried about crash or crime dangers while traveling in Chicago. “I trust that we’re on a mission from the Lord and as long as we’re doing the things we should be doing, the Lord will protect us.”

Bike use among sisters is still relatively uncommon, possibly due to supervisors being more protective of females. Wilson of West Town Bikes—who grew up in a Mormon family in Lincoln, Nebraska, but didn’t go on mission and doesn’t currently practice the religion—told me that in many districts women aren’t allowed to use bikes for missionary work, and that supervisors cite safety as the main concern.

Bingham says he’s especially mindful of keeping the young women safe on their bikes, even though he acknowledged that “the lady missionaries are very, very careful, the elders not so much.” For example, when one of the

women had a malfunctioning brake on her Schwinn three-speed, he insisted on taking it back to West Town to be fixed immediately. “In the case of the sisters, I wanted to make sure those bikes were right.”

Despite the protectiveness of some mentors, Aamodt and McCrary believe the number of women using bikes is growing. Aamodt has female friends who are doing mission work on bikes in Florida, and she’s also heard of cycling sisters in California and Japan.

One reason more female missionaries can be seen on bikes nowadays may be that the age requirement for women was lowered from 21 to 19 a few years ago. “So the increase in sisters on bikes probably reflects the overall increase in the number of female missionaries,” McCrary says.

The mission maintains a fleet of used bikes missionaries can borrow, but many elders buy new ones when they get to Chicago. Lightweight, inexpensive fixed-gear single-speeds are currently popular with the male missionaries. “The elders are obsessed with their fixies,” McCrary says. “They tease us that we should switch to fixed-gear.”

Since it’s less common for sisters to ride bikes, the ones who do tend to use the handme-downs, McCrary says. But the chain kept falling off the bicycle she was previously using, and its handlebars were covered with duct tape. “My dad’s a big cyclist back home in California, so he thought it would be a good idea to get a safer bike.” She now rides a silver Trek hybrid with a step-through frame.

The frame shape is important because sisters are generally required to wear skirts that cover the knees while working. “It allows the skirt to lay down around your legs while you bike,” McCrary notes. “We try to always stay modest.”

Despite their conservative dress, Aamodt and McCrary say they often experience sexual harassment when riding. “We get a lot of catcalling, a lot of inappropriate things being said,” Aamodt says. “It can be discouraging, but we try to brush it off and remember why we’re here.”

Then there’s the issue of “helmet hair,” Aamodt says. “Every day we put on our helmets and look in the mirror and say, ‘Well, we didn’t come here to look like models, we came here to serve the Lord, so if that means wearing helmets, that’s what we’ll do.’” v

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

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Digging for old Chicago-born filmmaker Bill Morrison’s astonishing documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the story of one of the greatest film finds in history by using the discovery itself.

By J.R. JONES

F

ilm changed the world with its power to conquer time, but time always gets its revenge. According to a comprehensive survey released by the Library of Congress in 2013, 70 percent of the silent features made in America are completely lost, and of the remaining 30 percent, only about half survive in their original format. Nitrate film, the industry J

ò LISA PREDKO; ASSISTANTS: JACQUELINE AYALA, TOM MICHAS; RETOUCHING: TOM MICHAS

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

One of the 1,500 reels of nitrate film recovered in 1978 from a sealed-up swimming pool in the Yukon. Nearly 1,000 of them were too far gone to be recovered. ò KATHY JONES GATES

continued from 13 norm for the cinema’s first half century, was highly flammable and, as it decayed, subject to spontaneous combustion, which led to numerous fires at storage facilities. Yet films from the silent era continue to turn up. One of the more miraculous discoveries in the history of film preservation came in 1978, when more than 500 cans of nitrate reels were recovered from a sealed-up swimming pool in the Klondike—the fabled Dawson City find.

“It was a story people knew if they were interested in old film,” remembers Bill Morrison, director of the staggering documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time. “And it was a story that eclipsed the actual content of what was found, because it was such a fantastic elevator pitch. You know: ‘Did you hear about the films that were found inside a swimming pool in the Yukon?’ . . . I remember puzzling about who that was or what that was.”

The film—which screens next Thursday, October 5, at Logan Center for the Arts with the filmmaker in attendance—is a monumental accomplishment, part history and part fever dream. Morrison, 51, tells the story of Dawson from its gold-rush origins in 1897 through the lost films’ rediscovery in the 1970s, even as he traces the growing power of cinema in our national life. Photographic images, clips from the Dawson City collection, and repurposed footage from other silent films combine with Alex Somers’s stirring score to create an epic narrative.

To watch Dawson City is to be pulled back into the past, speechless and humbled, as the dead reveal their secrets.

14 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Morrison watched every newsreel in the Dawson City collection, and his historical finds are impressive; the most striking of all may be a British Canadian newsreel recording a 1919 World Series game thrown by the Chicago White Sox—indeed, one of the very plays called into question at the time. To his surprise, there had been very little interest in the Dawson City collection over the years.

“Here was this incredible cache of films that was uncovered almost 40 years ago, but nobody had really looked at it,” he says. “Nobody knew that the Black Sox footage was down there. I found that on the first day!”

A

t the time the Dawson City films were recovered, Morrison was a 12-year-old preparing to enter eighth grade at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park, where his mother taught elementary classes from 1973 to ’96. His parents had met while his father, Bill Sr., was studying at Harvard Law School and his mother, Kate, was earning an English degree at Radcliffe; after marrying, the couple moved to Chicago to be near Kate’s family, buying a house in Kenwood and raising four children (three sisters and then Bill Jr.).

The Morrisons were a moviegoing family; Bill Jr. remembers early outings to the dilapidated State and Lake in the Loop and, closer to home, the Hyde Park at 53rd and Harper (now the Harper Theater). “We were often late,” he says, “so we would stay through the interval and try to catch the beginning of the movie. It was an odd way of seeing movies. I remember we were really confused

by The Sting, because we missed the whole setup and thought that it was this incredibly complicated movie. It wasn’t until later viewings that I realized it was a pretty straightforward movie, but if you didn’t see the setup, you were kinda behind the eight ball.” Even more obscure were movies at the Dunes Drive-In east of Gary, Indiana, which were visible from the Indiana Toll Road when the Morrisons drove from Kenwood out to their summer cottage in Michigan and back again. “I remember we would try to identify what movie we thought it was,” Bill says. “If we couldn’t name the title or the actor, we’d just call out what was happening on the screen. And we would always look forward to that moment.”

By 1978, Morrison had begun frequenting Cobb Hall, home of the university’s long-running Doc Films. “I got a lot of my early-70s-auteur education from those screenings,” he recalls. “It was a great way to go out at night, because basically I could just tell my mom and dad that I was going to the movies—that was an understood place where I could be. It was safe, and there was a finite time when the movie would end and they could expect me home. And it had the added benefit that if you just kept walking up to the balcony, you could sneak in.”

Morrison took advantage of Doc all through high school, graduating from the Lab Schools in 1983. He aspired to an art career, but his parents wanted him to attend a liberal arts school; at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he studied philosophy but also spent time drawing, painting, making prints, and shooting photographs. “Once I got out to Reed, and I got out from Chicago and saw a little bit of the world and read some more, I began to understand how my art could have a philosophical side to it,” Morrison explains. “So I don’t think they were years ill spent. I started thinking about the image in a different way.”

After two years at Reed, he scored an incredible break when a recruiter for Cooper Union, the historic private college in Manhattan’s East Village, got a look at his drawing portfolio and Morrison was admitted to the school, which then offered full scholarships to every student. “It gave me great autonomy, because all of a sudden I didn’t need to ask my parents for tuition,” he says. Morrison wrote his father a letter explaining his decision, and in fall 1985 he moved to the East Village, where he’s lived ever since.

Along with the free tuition, Cooper Union offered Morrison the opportunity to study with the experimental animator Robert Breer, creator of such colorful, kinetic shorts as Eyewash (1959) and Blazes (1961), who mentored the young man for his entire four years. “Breer opened up a world for me that film can be a painting as well, in fact it can be many paintings per second,” Morrison says. “There was also a way that he held himself that I found very approachable. . . . He was a midwesterner, and I found him very funny and down-to-earth.” Under Breer’s tutelage, Morrison tried his hand at stop-motion animation but, like so many others, was discouraged by the amount of repetitive labor required. Instead he turned to “an animation by distress” in which he shot color footage, enlarged each frame onto photographic paper, splashed the paper

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Left: Image from Dawson City: Frozen Time. The film connects the birth of cinema in the late 1890s to the gold fever that gripped North America.

Right: A boxer battles the ravages of time in Morrison’s experimental documentary Decasia (2002). It became the first film of the new millennium selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

with developer, and then shot a film frame of each print to reanimate the sequence onscreen.

After graduation Morrison worked at Cynosure, an optical printing house at the Film Center Building in Hell’s Kitchen, and found creative satisfaction making short films for the Ridge Theater, a small multimedia performance company that still serves as his home base. Eventually these commissions led him to the Library of Congress’s paper print collection, which was in the public domain and relatively easy to access. Until 1912 the library had allowed copyright registrants to submit paper prints of their films, about 40 frames to a page, in lieu of a negative, and over the years, as the original nitrate rotted away or burst into flame, paper turned out to be the more reliable storage method. The mysterious images to be found in the collection spoke to Morrison’s growing fascination with the past.

His favorite job by far, though, was washing dishes at the Village Vanguard, the famed jazz club on Seventh Avenue. “I could make my rent in a couple nights, ’cause that was all cash and I got tipped out,” he explains. “Once I got that, it allowed me an enormous amount of free time during the day to make my work. I don’t think I had to show up to the club until nine o’clock. I had a ball while I was there, I’d get home at two, and then I could get up the next morning at a reasonable hour and still have the day to myself. Even if I wanted to go out, I’d just go back to the club, and I could get in and drink for free.” Morrison worked at the Vanguard from 1991 to ’94, hearing countless sets by the likes of Art Taylor, Billy Higgins, Louis Hayes, and guitarist Bill Frisell, who would later collaborate with him on a film.

Morrison’s work for Ridge Theater had led to screenings of his 16-millimeter work at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, but as he puts it, “I was getting dangerously close to turning 30 and being a dishwasher, which was of some concern to me. It probably was to my parents as well, though they were very understanding.”

A graceful exit presented itself when the acclaimed experimental filmmaker Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Naqoyqatsi), who’d been impressed by Morrison’s short The Death Train, offered him a job at Fabrica, a new film-development project Reggio was launching in

Treviso, Italy, with funds from Benetton Group. After a year at Fabrica, he returned to New York with a new short, The Film of Her (1996), that not only appropriated images from the paper print collection but also delved into the collection’s history. With this meditation on the fragility of film, Morrison had found his true subject.

The Film of Her screened at numerous festivals, and Morrison picked up where he’d left off with Ridge Theater.

In spring 1998 he bought a hearse, loaded some camera equipment in the coffin bay, and headed west with two pals to shoot Ghost Trip, an off-the-cuff fantasy about a man driving to his own funeral, and to screen The Film of Her at microcinemas along the way. But Morrison’s big career break didn’t arrive until the following year, when Ridge Theater was commissioned to stage a symphonic performance in Switzerland of a new symphony to be written by U.S. composer Michael Gordon. This time Morrison’s film would be central to the experience, and he came to his collaborators with a daring concept: the entire work might be assembled from old nitrate film in advanced states of decomposition.

Morrison had been mightily impressed by Lyrical Nitrate (1991), a 50-minute Dutch film assembled by Peter Delpeut from silent movies made between 1905 and 1920 and found in the attic of the Cinema Parisien in Amsterdam. Most striking for Morrison was the last ten minutes, when Delpeut relaxes his standards and includes damaged footage in which the chemical emulsion has dried up and begun to peel away from the nitrate strip. The final sequence pictures Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and no sooner has Eve given Adam the apple than the screen explodes with God’s wrath, the image disintegrating into a machine-gun spray of mottled browns, broken blacks, and gray patches crumbling into a million little fissures. “That was sort of an aha moment for me,” Morrison recalls.

“Wow, the decay can really be part of the narrative.”

Not only could it be part of the narrative—it could be the entire narrative, the drama of a story replaced by the violent drama of the image fighting to survive. For research, Morrison paid a visit to the University of South Carolina, which had a nitrate film collection, and entered the search terms emulsion deterioration into the data-

base, getting hundreds of entries; narrowing the search to severe emulsion deterioration produced a more workable list of 150. That first day he turned up the powerful image of a boxer sparring with a roiling field of cracked emulsion, as well as footage of nuns and students at a parish school that would recur throughout the finished work.

Back in New York, Morrison sold the creative team on his idea. Gordon proposed “a decaying symphony,” and his score would make good on that promise with its delirious degradations of pitch and tempo. As a play on Walt Disney’s symphonic animation Fantasia, Morrison suggested the title Decasia.

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ith a green light from Gordon and Ridge, Morrison began digging through nitrate holdings at the Library of Congress, George Eastman House, Museum of Modern Art, and the University of South Carolina. The Library of Congress and MoMA had already transferred their holdings to safety stock, but Eastman House and USC still had live nitrate film. Back then, he remembers, archivists were more sensitive about decomposition of materials. “It was an older school,” he says. “They were not willing to show me their dirty laundry, or even admit that they had it. . . . There was this, almost embarrassment on the archives’ part, that if they showed that they had something that wasn’t pristine, then they were somehow failing at their job.”

Decasia premiered live at the 2001 Europäischer Musikmonat festival in Basel, Switzerland, with the Basel Sinfonietta positioned on a triangular frame above the audience and Morrison’s film projected onto a scrim in the center. “Wherever you walked in that space, the tuning would change, depending on whether you were closer to the instruments that were pitched flat or whether you were closer to the instruments that were pitched sharp,” Morrison recalls. “It was an otherworldly experience.” No less disorienting was Morrison’s feature, a hallucinatory journey through a world flaking away into nothingness. The imagery ranges from the representational, capturing people and places from a bygone era, to the abstract, the frame melting down into 16 Jackson Pollock paintings per second, though the most surreal shots are those in which the J

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

Left: Scene from a film in the Dawson City collection, collapsing into ruin Right: The Dawson Amateur Athletic Association, where the wooden cases of film were discovered

continued from 15 decay joins the action: at one point, rocket ships on a rotating carnival ride spin past the camera, the left side of the frame breaking up into white as if from the ships’ exhaust.

A release version of the film, running 67 minutes and furnished with Gordon’s score, premiered in January 2002 at the Sundance Film Festival. Morrison was enthusiastic about Decasia and ready to move up professionally: “I thought I’d paid my dues and I’d done some good work, and that I had something to say. The visual language that I had organically evolved to use, I wasn’t coming to it cold—I understood what it meant, and I understood the different layers of it. So I was pretty confident that what I was doing was strong. What I didn’t know was how other people were gonna respond to it.”

As he recalls, the movie polarized those who saw it at Sundance. “There were some highly laudatory reviews,” Morrison says, “and people who rushed at me and said, ‘You need to come be in my festival’ or ‘You need to come do this’ right afterwards. And then there were people who couldn’t get into whatever film they had tried to get into, rolled the dice with my film, and, ten minutes in, realized they were at something they had absolutely no desire to be in.” About 30 minutes into Decasia comes an image of the nuns leading their parochial students across a schoolyard, the children marching left to right and out of the frame; at one screening, Morrison remembers, audience members walking out on the movie formed a line just below the screen, filing out in the same direction as the students above their heads.

Walkouts notwithstanding, Decasia cemented Morrison’s artistic reputation. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones called it “a modern masterpiece,” and elaborated, “It makes you feel that the art, as opposed to the business, of cinema does have a future—even if it has to be found deep in the past.” The legendary avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger praised Decasia for being “compelling and disturbing,” and a story in the New York Times magazine quoted an awestruck Errol Morris remarking, “This may be the greatest movie ever made.” Decasia enjoyed a successful run on the festival and museum circuit, the Sun-

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dance Channel broadcast it at the end of 2002, and a DVD release from Plexi Films followed soon afterward. The greatest honor came in December 2013—two weeks after Bill Morrison Sr., had died of cancer—when the Library of Congress named Decasia to the National Film Registry of historic and culturally important works. It was the first film of the 21st century to earn that recognition.

T

he 12 years between Decasia’s premiere and its selection for the National Film Registry had been busy and fulfilling for Morrison. He’d continued to work with Ridge Theater, and in 2002 he’d married his longtime collaborator Laurie Olinder, the company’s projection and set designer. The success of Decasia had brought numerous commissions for short films to accompany classical music performances, as orchestras across Europe and the U.S. installed digital screens to lure younger patrons.

More recently he’d completed four short features. Spark of Being (2010), scored by jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, retold Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with repurposed silent footage; The Miners’ Hymns (2011), with a commanding, fanfare-laden score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, pondered the closed collieries of northeast England; Tributes: Pulse (2011) was another collage of decomposing nitrate, this one paying tribute to four U.S. composers; and The Great Flood (2013), Morrison’s project with Bill Frisell, revisited the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Now Morrison was researching his most ambitious project yet, a history of the Dawson City find.

Dawson City’s geography figured heavily in the preservation of the films. Located at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers, only 165 miles south of the arctic circle, Dawson was founded after news of gold along the Yukon River brought prospectors pouring into town, the population swelling to 30,000. The city’s boom years coincided perfectly with the advent of cinema as public entertainment: by 1910 the local Orpheum Theatre was screening films regularly and the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association had turned its gymnasium into a movie theater. In a town so remote, cinema offered residents a fleeting glimpse of the wider world.

Because Dawson lay so far north, at the tail end of the distribution chain, films took forever to arrive there: moviegoers waited six months for newsreels and two or three years for features, depending on their popularity. Distributors did business with the Dawson theaters through the local Canadian Bank of Commerce, and because the shipping charge to return a nitrate print to its point of origin often exceeded the value of the print itself, the bank found itself the custodian of a large and growing collection of old films. After the town’s Carnegie library burned down in 1920, its basement space was used by the bank as a film vault, the permafrost (a layer of frozen earth about ten feet below ground level, caused by the arctic climate) serving to keep the unstable nitrate cool and safe.

By 1929, however, the library basement was nearing capacity, and the advent of talkies made the old prints seem obsolete. Clifford Thomson, a bank executive, contacted distributors in hope of returning all the films but was instructed to destroy them. In the past, unwanted films had been torched or tossed into the Yukon River, but Thomson, also treasurer of the local hockey association, came up with another idea. For years the hockey league, which now owned the DAAA building, had complained about the skating rink, which was built on top of a 20-by-30-foot swimming pool and tended to sag in the middle. Thomson had the film reels, stored six or eight to a case, loaded into the pool; the space was filled in with dirt, and a new, permanent rink was constructed over the pool. Eight years later, on December 30, 1937, the building burned to the ground—possibly as a result of other nitrate prints that had accumulated there—but the 1,500 reels buried under the rink never ignited.

Forty-one years later, in 1978, Dawson was a much different place. The Alaska Highway, built during World War II, had bypassed Dawson City for Whitehorse, 300 miles to the south, and the other town had usurped Dawson’s status as capital of the Yukon territory. The Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, which had consolidated all mining interests in the area by 1927 and spent years dredging the local rivers, pulled out in 1966, leaving both the local economy and the landscape wrecked (Morrison’s film includes aerial shots of the scarred earth). Dawson’s

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White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte, filmed during the 1919 World Series by a cameraman for British Canadian Pathé News. The footage was Morrison’s most spectacular find as he investigated the Dawson City collection.

population had shrunk to fewer than 1,000 people the day a local alderman began bulldozing the remains of the DAAA building to clear land for a new recreation center and broke through the planks beneath the hockey rink to discover the wooden cases buried underneath.

The little tomb was immediately recognized as an important discovery, and a restoration project took shape under the supervision of Sam Kula, director of the National Film, Television and Sound Archives in Ottawa. Michael Gates, a conservator for the Klondike National Historic Sites who had first inspected the pool site, secured the use of an icehouse at one of the old mining camps near Dawson to use as a cold storage unit, and Kathy Jones, director of the Dawson City Museum and Historical Society, recruited students to unspool and evaluate the 1,500-odd reels unloaded from the pool. Nearly 1,000 reels were too far gone.

“I’m not sure what condition the emulsion was in while it was frozen underground,” Morrison says, “but certainly it didn’t help to have it then brought out into the August summer of the Yukon, with the change in temperature and the change in humidity. Evidently if you put your finger over the image, the emulsion would come off on your finger.”

Morrison had long considered the Dawson City find as a potential subject in itself, and the idea solidified unexpectedly when, in March 2013, he visited Ottawa to screen his films. Paul Gordon, whose Lost Dominion Screening Collective had organized one of the programs, supervised digital conversion of celluloid film at Library and Archives Canada, which held the complete Dawson City collection of 372 titles. The library would be acquiring a new 4K scanner the following year, he informed Morrison; this would enable the filmmaker to take home high-resolution files of anything in the collection, all of which was in the public domain.

At a film festival later that year, Morrison found an eager partner in producer Madeleine Molyneaux, and they secured early production funds from the Museum of Modern Art (in exchange for a 35-millimeter print of the finished product) and the French production company Arte France.

Morrison flew out to Ottawa in January 2014 to start viewing the collection, which had all been transferred to 35-millimeter safety stock in the 1980s as a joint project of L&A Canada and the U.S. Library of Congress. (The nitrate originals of the U.S. films were repatriated, and both institutions got a complete set of 35-millimeter transfers).

The Dawson City collection contained no lost masterpieces—anything of real value had been returned to distributors back in the day—yet there were numerous serials and more than 100 newsreels from the U.S. and the UK. Especially notable were 26 editions of British Canadian Pathé News—basically the British Pathé newsreel with a Canadian item tacked on at the end—which were produced between 1919 and ’22 but had never been available in any archive. Footage from game one and game four of the World Series, which pitted the Sox against the Cincinnati Reds, turned up in a 1919 edition of British Canadian Pathé,

DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME Directed by Bill Morrison, 120 min.

Morrison attends the screening.

Thu 10/5, 7 PM Logan Center for the Arts 915 E. 60th 773-702-2787 arts.uchicago.edu

“If the future is endless, so is the past.”

—Bill Morrison

with warm-up shots of pitcher Eddie Cicotte (who admitted taking money from gamblers to throw the series) and outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (who confessed to the same but later recanted), and a long shot of Cicotte’s purposely botched double play from the fourth inning of game one. Morrison thought about holding back this discovery for the film’s release, but Gordon wanted to post it online right away. The story picked up steam, and Morrison visited Sirius XM’s MLB Network to talk about the discovery with radio jock Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, the guest spot providing a brief, self-introductory clip for Dawson City.

Morrison returned to Ottawa in June for another viewing marathon, though the entire collection amounted to about 500,000 feet of film, a daunting prospect for any researcher. “Even if you’re fast-forwarding, the act of carefully handling a 35-millimeter print and placing it on a flatbed and viewing it, and then recanting it and making a note in an Excel spreadsheet or whatever you’re doing, you’re lucky to get through 20 prints in a day, let alone that those all have to be called from another facility,” Morrison says. “So I was working my way through this, but realizing that I needed to find another way of viewing these films.”

Fortunately the library installed its new scanner, after which Morrison began shipping 12-terabyte hard drives to Gordon to be loaded up with his footage requests and returned; the arrangement allowed Morrison the luxury of acquiring high-resolution, ready-to-screen files of everything he requested, even before he’d looked at it.

As Morrison made his way through the newsreel collection, more treasures surfaced. Universal Animated Weekly had footage of the Negro Silent Protest Pa- J

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

continued from 17 rade, a New York march organized by W.E.B. DuBois in July 1917 to protest violence against African-Americans across the U.S. British Canadian Pathé recorded the aftermath of the Wall Street bombing in September 1920, when an explosion across the street from J.P. Morgan’s headquarters killed 38 people. From a 1914 edition of Pathé Weekly came footage shot after the Ludlow Massacre, when the Colorado National Guard opened fire on striking miners from John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, killing two dozen. Another edition pictured anarchist leader Alexander Berkman speaking in support of the Colorado miners outside Rockefeller’s New York offices two weeks later; by a stroke of luck, Morrison also located a 1919 edition of International News that showed the mass deportation of political radicals aboard the “Russian Ark” at Ellis Island, and found a shot of Berkman stopping to look at the camera before heading down the gangplank.

These discoveries heightened Morrison’s sense of Dawson City: Frozen Time as a film about “the tragedy of capitalism,” though of course that theme was inherent in the town’s founding amid the Klondike gold rush, and in the evacuation of the indigenous Han tribe from the area.

“Going in, I saw that there was this chronological affinity between the birth of cinema and the discovery of gold in Dawson City. Before the discovery of gold, there were thousands and thousands of years—20,000 years, even—

18 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

of sustained existence by a native people, and that doesn’t exist anymore in our continent, in the same way. . . . And then cinema represents another line in the sand, where stories are never gonna be told the same way again.”

Dawson City: Frozen Time runs a full two hours—marathon length for a theatrical documentary—yet Morrison, who edits his own films, weaves together his diverse source materials, not to mention his twin tales of gold and nitrate, with a master’s ease. Each clip is identified and dated with onscreen captions (in the manner of Thom Andersen’s film essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, a favorite of Morrison’s), yet clusters of images selected from dramatic films often serve to illustrate true stories from Dawson’s past. At one point, amid a documentary sequence on the harsh conditions faced by prospectors, footage from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) shows the Tramp hopping onto a snowdrift and sliding down a mountainside, the reality and the dream merging. One of the most beautiful montages in Dawson City, communicating how newsreels delivered the outside world to the frozen north, builds from the intimate (microscopic images of frog eggs, a series of flowers in bloom) to the immense, with people and events from the four corners of the earth.

Morrison and Molyneaux premiered Dawson City at the Venice film festival in September 2016, and the film has toured the U.S. this year (next Thursday’s program at Logan Center follows two earlier Chicago engagements at Gene Siskel Film Center). Kino Lorber will release a Blu-

Ray/DVD edition at the end of October, with a Morrison interview and additional films from the Dawson City collection as bonus material. Meanwhile, Morrison is already researching his next project: earlier this month, he and Olinder traveled to Iceland to inspect a recovered print of the 1968 Soviet feature The Village Detective, which was found by a fishing boat as it trawled the North Atlantic Sea. “The reels themselves have completely rusted off,” Morrison explains, “so you just have these four naked rolls of film that have melded together into a single cylinder.”

From this exotic find, he wants to spin a screen biography of the movie’s star, Mikhail Zharov, a beloved character actor whose career spanned the Soviet era and whose fortunes rose and fell with the political tides.

When I ask Morrison if he’ll ever exhaust his chosen idiom, he concedes there are challenges to the archival film, but he laughs at the notion that he’ll ever run out of source material. “There’s a ton of stuff in archives all over the world,” he says. “Think of all the stuff in Russia that hasn’t been catalogued at all. There might be footage of Rasputin that we don’t know about! I know there are people that say, ‘OK, this is another archival compilation with music.’ But the films are very different, and they use archival film, and the fact that it’s deteriorated, in very different ways. So I think, if the future is endless, so is the past.” v

@JR_Jones

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ARTS & CULTURE ARCHITECTURE

Obtuse angle

By DEANNA ISAACS

I

f you’re not an architect, or some other kind of construction savant, but are planning to see the Chicago Architecture Biennial, here’s some advice: grab one of the several daily free tours. In spite of the fact that CAB now has a half-dozen satellite shows in various neighborhoods, the main exhibition, at the Cultural Center, is massive, featuring projects by more than 140 international architectural firms and artists.

It’s a lot to get your head around, and the 45-minute tour (offered at 2:30 and 5:30 PM Tuesday through Friday, 11 AM and 3:30 PM weekends) can provide a set of anchor points that make it easier to navigate the rest. If the tour times don’t work for you, there are a couple of CAB handouts on-site that’ll be of some help. One is a map that plots project locations, spread throughout the enormous venue. (The Cultural Center, two separate entities when it opened in 1897, can be confusing even when it’s not hosting a bewildering array of exhibits.) The other is a guide that’ll point you to three or four projects on each floor.

Which raises the Biennial’s main problem for nonarchitect visitors: communication.

While this brief guide reads as though written for grade-school tour groups, much of the wall text throughout the exhibition (as well as the catalog text) errs at the other extreme, indulging in muddled, obfuscating jargon that’s indecipherable even to interested adults.

Unlike the first biennial, two years ago, this show, curated by the Los Angeles-based team of Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, has an official theme, “Make New History.” That’s focused it in some ways, but also has made it more inward-looking, less committed to social activism, and more prone to writing that’s sometimes technical, but more often pseudoacademic blather.

It’s not totally random, however. CAB staff consultant Garrett Karp, who was leading a tour when I dropped in last week, said the show is loosely organized from the bottom up, with mostly real, already-built projects in the main-floor galleries and successively more futuristic and speculative work on the upper levels.

That’s why a big, inscrutable black cube is the first thing you’ll encounter if you veer left after entering on the Washington Street side of the building. Created by Italian architecture firm the Empire, it’s a representation of an actual, historically important structure that was built right here: Enrico Fermi’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1.

Enter on the Randolph Street side of the building and you’ll be greeted by a couple of equally blunt but less somber projects: a glaring yellow postmodern reception area by Chicago architect Ania Jaworska in the lobby, and an “intervention” by Mexico City’s Frida Escobedo—a sloped floor that (according to the archi-speak) “interrogates the grid” while rendering the Randolph Square space unusable. (Karp says it’s made of movable pieces that’ll be rearranged before too long.)

If you have less than, say, five or six hours (or, better yet, several days) to take everything in, you’ll want to hustle up to the second floor, where the gorgeous old Grand Army of the Republic Rotunda houses a

UrbanLab, A Room Enclosed by Hills and Mountains, at the Chicago Architecture Biennial ! COURTESY CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL

computer-generated and imaginatively enhanced (if sterile) model of the IIT campus and surrounding area (by IIT and SANAA), and the G.A.R. Hall hosts one of the Biennial’s major collective projects, “Horizontal City.”

The latter is a group of fantastic miniature interiors, each inspired by a photograph of a real historical room.

The Chicago firm UrbanLab has contributed a project for “Horizontal City” that’s one of my favorites of the show. It’s a theory-driven play on an equally theory-driven 1970s photo collage (by Superstudio). But you can, if you choose, bypass the theory and go right to the irresistible windows it offers into a strange, vast, Lilliputian landscape of saguaro and tiny human figures on a ground of starkly illuminated grid. Thanks to some ingeniously placed mirrors, your own giant face will be part of the scene, which Karp says makes it a popular spot for selfies.

You’ll also want to make time for a second collective project, “ Vertica l City,” in Yates Hall on the fourth f loor. Fifteen

architectural firms have reinterpreted the Tribune Tower competition, inspired by both the 1922 original contest and Stanley Tigerman’s 1980 redux. Each built an approximately 16-foot model, and all of them, plus similarly tall models of two of the 1922 designs, are on display.

It’s a fascinating exercise, with an ironic edge for Chicagoans now that the Tribune is about to move from its iconic home, relinquishing the architectural symbol of its former power. But to appreciate it as something more than what looks like a forest of giant chess pieces, viewers need to understand which historic designs each model is referencing. When I was there, none of the models were labeled. Diagrams, posted at an inconvenient distance, failed to include the two historic pieces. They were as baffling as most of the wall text.

CAB says it’s on that. It’ll soon have a handout that’ll make everything clear. v

" @DeannaIsaacs

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE

R

Ian Bedford (Eddie), Catherine Combs (Catherine) and Andrus Nichols (Beatrice) ! LIZ LAUREN

THEATER

What would Arthur Miller say about immigration?

By TONY ADLER

A

View From the Bridge premiered in its final, two-act form in 1956, the same year its author, Arthur Miller, refused to name names at a hearing held by the House Un-American Activities Committee—part of HUAC’s long and sordid effort to expose “the communist influence” on show business. The U.S. government had already been harassing Miller for a while by then, having, among other things, denied him a passport for a trip to see a Belgian production of The Crucible.

During the hearing Miller was asked who was present at certain red gatherings he’d attended in New York a decade earlier. His reply earned him a contempt citation. “I could not use the name of another person,” he said, “and bring trouble on him.”

Which might as well be the epigraph for A View From the Bridge, running now at Goodman Theatre in an unforgettable production that originated with London’s Young Vic in 2014. (Oddly enough, the 1956 premiere took place in London too, under the direction of Peter Brook and after some contortions to get around the Lord Chamberlain, who’d banned it.)

Bridge is one of Miller’s great tragedies of the common man—like Death of a Salesman, only more so. It tells the tale of Eddie

Carbone, a longshoreman who shares an apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn (“the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world,” we’re told), with his wife, Beatrice, and their 17-year-old niece, Catherine, a member of the household since childhood.

Eddie’s the epitome of the hard-working family man. He tries to stay employed even when there’s no tonnage getting swallowed at the wharf, comes straight home from the job, confines his drinking to a beer or two, saves his money, and pushes Catherine to better herself by taking stenography so she’ll work in an office and meet a better class of people.

He disapproves when he notices her “walkin’ wavy”—i.e., with a sexy sway in her step.

One could say Eddie dotes on Catherine, if one wanted to put it delicately. No, he’s not an abuser, a pedophile, a rapist. But it’s no secret from anybody other than Eddie himself that he’s profoundly fixated. Not a secret, especially, in Ivo van Hove’s staging, where the physical language between Catherine Combs’s Catherine and Ian Bedford’s heartbreaking Eddie is heightened to levels just this side of pawing. The first time we see them together, as Eddie’s walking in the door after work, Catherine gives him a bright hello and Miller’s stage direction says, “Eddie is pleased and therefore shy about it; he hangs up his cap

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READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

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and jacket.” By way of enormous contrast, van Hove has her punctuate her greeting by leaping up onto Eddie’s bearish torso, her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist in a sexually resonant gesture that’s repeated over and over again throughout the drama.

Eddie isn’t just a middle-aged lunk with a yen; he’s Phèdre in a T-shirt.

Eddie’s unacknowledged passion reaches its crisis when two of Beatrice’s Italian cousins, brothers Marco and Rodolpho, arrive by ship as illegal immigrants—“submarines” in the play’s parlance—and board with the Carbones. Marco (Brandon Espinoza, as quiet as stone) is a focused sort, interested in nothing but working hard, staying out of trouble, and sending home the money that will keep his wife and kids from starvation. Rodolpho, though, is young and single and possessed of an ebullient sweetness (nicely embodied by Daniel Abeles). He sings, he likes to dance. It’s only natural that Catherine would find him attractive.

And inevitable that Eddie would find himself in a state of inchoate rage. He knows there’s an easy way to deal with Rodolpho, whom he’s demonized as a cunning homosexual manipulating Catherine into marrying him so he can stay in the country. The two brothers are illegals, after all. It would be over in a second if someone were to call Immigration on them. But as Miller suggested to HUAC and the unwritten moral code of Eddie’s neighborhood attests, it’s evil to “use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.”

No doubt Eddie Carbone’s moment of truth had particular meaning for English audiences at the Young Vic or for a Belgian like van Hove, all of whom have to formulate a response to their own influx of submarines.

Here, the government’s cascade of nativist policies—build the wall, reject Muslim immigrants, penalize the sanctuary cities, return the Dreamers—gives a special urgency to this 60-year-old tragedy written by a man whose father and grandparents were immigrants and whose right to travel had been curtailed because of his politics. The back wall of Jan Versweyveld’s set is particularly evocative in this regard: it consists of a high wall, featureless except for a very narrow door. v R A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE Through 10/15: Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM (2 PM only 10/15); also Tue 10/3, 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmanthetre.org, $34-$97.

MYRNA SALAZAR WAS IN HOUSTON the day I talked to her by phone, with a lot to worry about. She has family in Puerto Rico— including her mother, whom, she said, she was trying to get off the hurricane-devastated island. She was also less than a week away from opening a brand-new theater festival.

Salazar, previously a director at the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, currently runs the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, which she helped found last year. That makes her the point person for CLATA’s first major project: the Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, running September 29 through October 28 at various venues and featuring a total of 11 productions from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and New York, as well as Chicago.

According to Salazar, the impulse for starting CLATA emerged from a frustrating professional episode. “A young playwright . . . came to me to see if I could raise some funds,” she recalls. When she failed despite her experience and connections, she “saw the great need there might be in Chicago for emerging artists and playwrights . . . to have access to funding.”

Salazar considers the festival a practical way to fulfill that need, and she’s frank about her intent: more than exhibiting foreign shows, she hopes to connect local audiences with local Latino companies, four of which have work on the schedule. “I want [audiences] to be engaged,” she states. “I want them to buy their tickets.”

“We are very new, this has been moving quite rapidly—and I’m scared!” Salazar says of the festival from her room in Houston. But she’s laughing as she says it. —TONY ADLER CHICAGO LATINO THEATER FESTIVAL 9/29-

" @taadler

10/28: various times and locations, clata.org, $15-$25.

Teatro Línea de Sombra’s Amarillo ! SOPHIE GARCIA

THEATER

International programming, local ambitions

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Michel Rodriguez Cintra ! BENJAMIN WARDELL

DANCE

The LatinxArts fest gets on its feet

Molly Shanahan ! WILLIAM FREDERKING

DANCE

Fifteen ways of looking

By IRENE HSIAO

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lackbird’s Ventriloquy, a 50-minute solo performed and created by Molly Shanahan, opens on a contrast between image and sound—the wood floor and white walls of Links Hall an empty cavern for a score by Kevin O’Donnell that presents small effects hardly heard—a melody, an engine—under a deceptively uniform layer of water rushing.

There are always at least two surfaces to peruse in Ventriloquy, which Shanahan describes as meaning, etymologically, “speaking from the gut,” but which Merriam-Webster lists as an alternate for “ventriloquism,” “the production of the voice in such a way that the sound seems to come from a source other than the vocal organs of the speaker.”

When Shanahan appears, walking from left to right of center, there are two of her— Shanahan and her shadow—and they move forward in a characteristically Shanahan phrase: organic and idiosyncratic, virtuosic in embodiment, labyrinthine, gestural. Her left hand appears to hold the weight of an organ of moderate size, perhaps the heart or a kidney. She returns to her starting position and repeats the phrase again and again, as if practicing a signature or revising an introduction: my name is, my name is. People think a dancer is her body, but, as Shanahan shows with each investigation of the undercurve, a dancer is how her body thinks.

Ventriloquy proceeds in vignettes anchored by props deployed with varying degrees of awkwardness, beginning with a telephone.

It does not ring, but she picks up and says, “Hello, hello, hello, hello,” and then “Hi, hi, hi,

IN A YEAR THAT’S BEEN ESPECIALLY tough on immigrants, the arts can foster a sense of community that provides relief.

Hairpin Arts Center is rising to the occasion with the monthlong LatinxArts festival, featuring free workshops, exhibitions, and performances—among them, the one-night-only Movements: A Show of Work by Three Immigrant Dancemakers.

“In Chicago, our Latinx community is very large, and it is important for these people and their kids to see themselves represented when they go see dance and arts events,” says Michel Rodriguez Cintra of Lucky Plush, who’ll perform a duet from a work in progress, Give and Take, with his wife, Jordan Reinwald.

hi” in a way that’s at first theatrical, then absurd, then mechanical. The ventilation system roars up in the silence: actual or recorded air?

This sense of unease is intensified by the next scene, Shanahan crouched like a vagabond next to an iPad set to play an image of a burning log, seeming to eat from an empty pie pan. The image of homelessness is disturbing: the absence of personal context contrasts with a figure engaged in an action that is both public and private, inhabiting a hostile space, nevertheless. Each image in the sequence is punctuated by a surge of pure movement.

Here, she explores with grotesque sensuality the hollows of her hands, the torso as an engine of expression and concealment, the body as a puppet possessed by neuroses.

Most striking is Shanahan’s use of the iPad not as a screen, but a mirror, which she holds facing the audience as she faces upstage, making a two-headed, Janus-faced monster of herself. She puts in earplugs and sings along to an iPod—raw, thin, and uneven against any grander contemplation of the self. v R BLACKBIRD’S VENTRILOQUY Thu 9/28-Sat 9/30, 7 PM, Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 773-281-0824, linkshall.org, $20, $15 industry, $10 students.

Wilfredo Rivera, artistic director of Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre, offers selections from his suite American Catracho, which expresses the trauma of an immigrant’s initial entry into the United States. “Dance can serve as a platform to bring about themes of equity and justice and acceptance,” Rivera says. “In our own artistic way, we peel back the layers of fear and not knowing each other.”

That sentiment is echoed by Victor Alexander, whose two pieces, Among Us and Neutral, explore ancestral connections and emotional repression. “[Dance] is a vehicle . . . to engage, communicate, and create possibilities for our society,” says

Alexander.

In all, Movements “encourages the audience to look at each choreographer’s work with fresh eyes considering the ongoing national debate around the value of contributions by immigrants to our society,” says Hairpin’s performing arts director Kacie Smith. This free program makes it easy to discover the beauty that emerges when immigrants have the opportunity to create works that speak to their specific experience. —OLIVER SAVA MOVEMENTS: A SHOW OF WORK BY THREE IMMIGRANT DANCEMAKERS Fri 10/29, 8 PM, Hairpin Arts Center, 2800 N. Milwaukee, second floor, 773-661-6361, hairpinarts.org. F

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017–MARCH 11, 2018

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL

" @IreneCHsiao SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE VISUAL ART

Bonds over Baghdad

By LEE ANN NORMAN

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hroughout his career, conceptual artist and Northwestern professor Michael Rakowitz has used simple provocations to reveal the complexities of human relationships. Rakowitz is the son of Jewish parents, an American father and an Iraqi-American mother, and grew up in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island. His maternal grandparents fled Iraq in 1946, no longer feeling safe there when British colonial forces withdrew after World War II and political upheaval ensued. Much of Rakowitz’s work centers around the absence of anything “Iraqi” in the U.S. that isn’t related to war, and his sculptures, performances, drawings, and illustrations in some ways act as a remedy to that—they’re substitutes for missing cultural context. “Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West,” now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, features ten of his most iconic artworks and a new stop-motion animation piece. The show is filled with stories, conversations with strangers and new friends, and research; it’s a demonstration of the human desire to manifest memories.

To repair, mend, and recoup cultural histories, Rakowitz grounds his artwork in social interaction, persuading audiences to contemplate the resulting tensions: between hospitality and hostility, conflict and agreement, or complicity and innocence. Low-risk actions like preparing and sharing food or discussing science fiction films, to take two examples from “Backstroke of the West,” can create an opening for asking more complicated questions about culture, nationality, religion, class, and power.

Enemy Kitchen (2003-ongoing) started as cooking classes in which middle and high school students were taught Iraqi and Jewish-Iraqi recipes. During the third week of the project, a student complained about making Iraqi cuisine, expressing confusion

22 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Installation view of a photograph illustrating that the dishware in Rakowitz’s Spoils was looted from Saddam Hussein’s palaces after they were destroyed by coalition forces. Personal household items such as plates and silverware were taken by Iraqi citizens, many of whom used them in their own homes. ! NATHAN KEAY/MCA CHICAGO

because Iraqis were responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Another student countered that the assertion wasn’t true, but that the blame lay with Osama bin Laden; a different pupil disagreed, saying the U.S. government was accountable. In this brief exchange, the classroom became a microcosm of discussion surrounding the Iraq war. A later iteration of Enemy Kitchen was a mobile kitchen where Iraq war refugees prepared dishes and American military veterans served them.

To further explore the correlation between hospitality and hostility, Rakowitz collaborated with renowned New York City chef Kevin Lasko in 2011 to create a dish inspired by the flavors of Iraq; the entree was served at the upscale Manhattan restaurant Park Avenue Autumn on china looted from Saddam Hussein’s palace, purchased on eBay. The reaction to the project (titled Spoils) was polarizing.

People sent angry e-mails calling for Park Avenue Autumn to take the dish off the menu.

Yet the demand for the course was so high that Lasko and Rakowitz considered trying to buy more of the looted china so they could prepare more platings at the same time. Two weeks before Spoils was to end, Park Avenue Autumn received a cease and desist notice from the U.S. State Department, which claimed that the

plateware should be repatriated to Iraq.

Cultural objects also figure heavily in Rakowitz’s work. In The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2006-ongoing), he and a team of studio assistants reconstructed hundreds of the missing, stolen, or destroyed objects from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. The human figures, daggers, vases, and other objects were sculpted to scale out of Arabic-language newspapers and food packaging; to approximate their size and shape, Rakowitz relied on Interpol-alert descriptions, research, and photographs compiled by archeologists at the Oriental Institute. The use of detritus to make Iraqi objects that may never be repatriated—to date there’s no stable infrastructure for the artifacts to be returned, catalogued, and properly cared for—becomes a comment on the failure of the U.S. military to protect Iraq’s centuries-old cultural heritage during the war.

As the Taliban and like-minded groups have looted and destroyed cultural institutions and objects, What Dust Will Rise? (2012) highlights the challenges of preserving culture while valuing the human life that’s responsible for it. The project, a commission for the German exhibition Documenta 13, displays re-creations of books that were lost when

the British Royal Air Force bombed the city of Kassel, Germany, in 1941. Rakowitz collaborated with stone carvers in Afghanistan and Italy to make the books out of rocks sourced from the hills of Bamiyan, where giant centuries-old Buddha statues were destroyed by the Taliban. Text in a vitrine explains Mullah Mohammed Omar’s decision to dynamite the statues despite their importance to Afghani culture: Swedish archaeologists had rejected using funds for the statues’ restoration to feed suffering Afghani women and children.

“Backstroke of the West” exemplifies Rakowitz’s desire to memorialize and acknowledge loss. He accomplishes as much, through unexpected items such as food wrappers, family recipes, tchotchkes, and stories. Most importantly, such an achievement opens the door for potential reconciliation. v R “MICHAEL RAKOWITZ: BACKSTROKE OF THE WEST” Through 3/4/18. Tue 10 AM-9 PM, WedThu 10 AM-5 PM, Fri 10 AM-9 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $12, $7 students and seniors, free kids 12 and under and members of the military, free for Illinois residents on Tuesdays.

" @namronnnaeel

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By inserting herself into the piece through her image and her voice, Weems also serves as an observer of past events. She bears witness to a 1963 civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama; she’s among Hopi women in Arizona. Weems has said that she’s not a political artist, though one can’t help but view her work through that lens. She’s clearly concerned with understanding humanity, exposing our darkest moments, and helping to envision new realities. In an era that feels plagued by defeats, the historical struggles depicted in Ritual and Revolution are a helpful reminder of how much has already been won. v R “CARRIE MAE WEEMS: RITUAL AND REVOLUTION” Through 12/10: Tue-Wed 10 AM-5 PM, Thu-Fri 10 AM-8 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Northwestern University Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, 847-491-4000, blockmuseum.northwestern.edu. F Carrie Mae Weems, Ritual and Revolution, 1998 ! COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

" @booksnotboys

VISUAL ART

Banners at the Block

By KERRY CARDOZA

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ver the course of her decades-long career, Carrie Mae Weems has repeatedly demonstrated how adept she is at navigating the human experience. Yet she does so while making her audiences consider uncomfortable questions. Her early photo series “Colored People” consists of black-and-white portraits of African-American children tinted with shades whose names, coined by Weems, double as descriptions of their skin tones—Blue Black Boy and Golden Yella Girl, for example—which historically have played a role in determining the social hierarchies of black communities. The more recent “Museums” project shows the artist, her back to the camera, standing in front of international art museums, drawing attention to notions of power and architecture as well as to the collecting practices of the institutions themselves. These themes and more show up in Ritual and Revolution, a small but powerful installation originally created in 1998, on view now at the Block Museum.

The artwork is meant to envelop the viewer.

Audio plays on a loop: it’s Weems reading a

poetic narrative invoking different moments in history. “I was with you in the / ancient ruins of time,” her voice intones. “Out of the shadows / from the edge of the new world / I saw your slow persistent emergence / and I saw you spinning Jenny’s cotton into gold.”

When you enter the gallery you encounter the first of several layers of muslin banners hanging from the ceiling. Each banner is digitally printed with a black-and-white image that recalls a historical moment of radical transformation: the French Revolution, the Middle Passage. The fabrics are arranged in a way that allows visitors the space to move through the works and see them from all sides.

The first banner, centered between two other pieces, is a photo of the artist dressed as the Queen of May in a flowing dress and with flowers in her hair. Traditionally a figure in pagan rituals celebrating the start of spring, the May Queen is a perfect intermediary for the subjects in this show—she invokes both the renewal and hope inherent in spring as well as May Day’s contemporary connotation as International Workers Day.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

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ARTS & CULTURE

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164 North State Street

SEPT 29 - OCT 5 • IN TRANSIT

Judi Dench and Ali Fazal in Victoria & Abdul

THE FINAL FILM BY ALBERT MAYSLES “Alive with talk and scenic beauty.” — Village Voice

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EARLY WARNINGS

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ritish filmmakers have long mined their nation’s history for subject matter, but with the UK’s exit from the European Union looming, we can expect even more period fare as England contemplates its future by revisiting its past. Already this year has brought Their Finest, A United Kingdom, Churchill, Dunkirk, and Viceroy’s House; now comes Victoria & Abdul, Stephen Frears’s take on the double dealings inside Queen Victoria’s retinue toward the end of her reign.

As suggested by the opening title—“Based on rea l events . . . mostly”—th is is a tongue-in-cheek comedy that plays fast and loose with history.

Judi Dench is right at home as the lonely monarch, having already played Victoria in John Madden’s biopic Mrs. Brown (1997). In both pictures, the queen mourns the death of her consort, Prince Albert, and weathers various intrigues as her snooty court tries to block an outsider who becomes her trusted friend. In Madden’s movie that upstart is John Brown, a rough-edged Scottish stable hand; in Frears’s movie, Abdul Karim, an Indian attendant to the queen, represents even more of an affront as a brown-skinned Muslim. Sent to England for the 1887 Golden Jubilee, he captures Victoria’s eye by reverently kissing ssss EXCELLENT

24 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

sss GOOD

her toe and defies expectations by staying on as her secretary and Urdu teacher.

When producers buy the screen rights to a book—in this case Shrabani Basu’s biography of Karim—they’re free to adapt it at will.

With a screenplay by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot), this is certainly Frears’s wittiest, most entertaining film since The Queen (2006). Yet his attitude toward the young Asian man at its center veers on condescension, somewhat surprisingly for a director whose own films (My Beautiful Laundrette, Dirty Pretty Things) have been part of Britain’s stride toward racial and ethnic inclusion.

As Abdul, Ali Fazal resembles some exotic hybrid of puppy and peacock, doting on the queen as he struts about in ever finer attire.

He is naively unprepared for his banishment after Victoria dies and her whining son Bertie (Eddie Izzard) takes the throne as Edward VII. In real life Karim acutely recognized British prejudices and used his position to further the welfare of Muslims in India. Victoria & Abdul may capture the ugly side of Britain’s colonial past, but its demeaning portrait of Abdul reinforces the Orientalism it purports to lampoon. v VICTORIA & ABDUL ss Directed by Stephen Frears. PG-13, 112 min. For venues and showtimes visit chicagoreader.com/movies.

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JASON STEIN ISN’T KIDDING AROUND Not even arena gigs with his famous sister, comedian Amy Schumer, can tempt this Chicago bass clarinetist from his drive to make better jazz.

By PETER MARGASAK

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n December 4, 2015, Chicago bass clarinetist Jason Stein played his first arena show, at the BMO Harris Bradley Center in Milwaukee. He knew that the 14,000 people in the audience hadn’t come to see him, even though he’s toured on several continents and earned acclaim in the New York Times and DownBeat magazine—free jazz isn’t a lucrative racket. For Stein and the musicians who share his circuit, a crowd of 50 in a cozy bar like the Hungry Brain counts as a respectable turnout.

The star who’d filled the arena was one of Stein’s two younger sisters, comedian Amy Schumer—and that night was the beginning of what would become a regular opening gig for Stein and his long-running trio Locksmith Isidore, with Chicago bassist Jason Roebke and New York drummer Mike Pride.

Stein was initially skeptical that fans who’d come out to see Schumer’s comedy would tolerate his music. “When we first started doing them, my vibe was to be really sarcastic and assume that everyone was bummed out that they had to listen to jazz,” he says. But his self-deprecation turned out to be unwarranted. “After a few of those, both Amy and Cayce [DuMont], my wife, said, ‘It doesn’t make sense for you to do that, because everyone seem to be having a good time.’”

Stein has been a fixture on Chicago’s jazz and improvised-music scene for 12 years, playing his notoriously unwieldy instrument with fluidity, soul, and grace. When Locksmith Isidore hit the road with Schumer, they stuck to the same repertoire—rooted in driving, swinging postbop and often enlivened with daring feats of improvisation—that they’d J

ò SHEA WHINNERY

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

26 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

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The new Lucille! is Jason Stein’s first album as a bandleader in six years.

continued from 25 a streak of solid albums under his own honed at Chicago clubs such as the Hungry name, but then he decided that improving Brain, the Hideout, and Elastic. As far as his his playing was more important than buildbandmates could tell, Stein came to feel the ing on that momentum—in 2011 he stepped same way about those stadium crowds as away from leading bands, focusing instead he did about any crowd: “There were nights on gigging as a sideman and practicing at where we’d be playing in a world-famous home. The new album is his first as a leader arena for 15,000 people,” Pride says, “and his in six years. stage banter was no different than when we On the hard-swinging Lucille! Stein gets played in front of 50 people at some creepy top-shelf support from reedist Keefe Jackhaunt in Vienna or in front of 15 people at a son, bassist Joshua Abrams, and drummer thrift store in Charlotte.”

Tom Rainey, and his own performances These days Schumer is busy finishing a validate his decision to dedicate himself movie and launching a Broadway show with to improving as a musician. The album is a Steve Martin, so Stein is back on his own major leap forward for an artist who began grind. On Friday, he celebrates the release by taking a leap—now 40 years old, he of the excellent quartet album Lucille! (Delpicked up the bass clarinet at 22 and played mark) with a performance at Constellation, his first show with it that same week. The capacity 150. In most ways the big gigs with nine tunes on Lucille! include three of his his sister haven’t changed him at all, though own, sprinkled among bebop classics associthey have provided a degree of financial staated with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, bility. “I’m living the dream,” Stein says earand Lennie Tristano, all of which the quartet nestly. “It’s not that much of a dream. I can reinvents via Stein’s deft, elevated interplay hang out with my [daughter Ida] and Cayce, with Jackson.

I can practice a lot, and I can play whenever I want. That’s all I want.” orn in Long Island in 1976, Stein was a Schumer’s business is to some extent a basketball prodigy in high school (he’s family affair—her other sibling, Kim Carasix foot four), but after he graduated mele, has worked as a cowriter and producer in 1995 he felt aimless. When he turned 18, on her TV shows—and this has meant addihe received a life insurance settlement that tional opportunities for Stein too. He’s his father had left him in his will. (He’d turned up alongside Schumer on died when Stein was 11.) The TV several times: in a trio with money was supposed to pay drummer Questlove and for college, but Stein used jazz bassist Christian Mcit to finance several years Bride in a 2016 send-up of drifting. In 1996 he JASON STEIN QUARTET of an old Muppets skit went to Helena to join Sat 9/30, 8:30 PM, for Inside Amy Schumer, the Montana ConservaConstellation, 3111 N. Western, constellationin a 2016 interview on tion Corps; in 1997 he chicago.com, $10, 18+ Chelsea Handler’s Netflix traveled by bus from San series Chelsea, and on a Diego through Mexico to 2017 episode of Celebrity Honduras and Guatemala; Family Feud. But he’s not in 1998 he studied math and interested in parlaying the conphilosophy at Stony Brook Uninection into his own shot in showbiz. versity on Long Island in New York.

“If I wanted to be famous, enough things “My grandma (not lovingly) called me the have come up that I could say, ‘I’m Amy Wandering Jew,” he says.

Schumer’s brother,’ and it could be a thing,” Stein began exploring music in earnest in Stein says. “But I would never do that in early 1999, after moving to Bozeman, Mona million years—there’s no appeal to me tana—he played jazz standards on guitar in about that.” When he toured with Schumer, a local band that had a weekly restaurant he didn’t even try to sell his records to the gig. He discovered the bass clarinet in May folks who came out, insisting that the shows of that year, after he’d already been accepted weren’t about him. to Bennington College, an unorthodox school Stein has never been much of a careerist. in Vermont. (He intended to study writing After moving to Chicago in 2005, he released when he started classes that fall.) Taken by

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the sound of Eric Dolphy’s horn on a John Coltrane album, he stopped at a Bozeman music shop. “I was like, ‘I’ve heard of this instrument—I think it’s called a bass clarinet.

Do you know what I’m talking about?’ ” he recalls. The shop did, of course. After learning the proper embouchure from the owner, Stein rented a horn and took it home. “That day I learned everything I could already play on my guitar on the instrument, and I played it on my gig that weekend,” he says. “I wanted something to give a shit about, and it was a good fit. It gave me something to focus on.”

Before school started at Bennington in September, Stein made a trip home, stopping by the small apartment in Rockville Centre, New York, where his sisters and mother lived (technically they’re his half sisters—Stein’s mother remarried when he was three). “I told them I was really into this instrument, and I took it out and played it,” he says. “Amy was really sweet and started crying. I could really play, and she understood that I was really, really excited.”

At Bennington, Stein practiced bass clarinet constantly and switched his concentration from writing to music. But he felt that the school’s jazz program—whose faculty then included free-jazz greats Charles Gayle and Milford Graves—was geared toward

advanced students and didn’t give enough attention to rudiments. Even though Stein was a quick study and had already taught himself a great deal, he dropped out after a semester and returned to Bozeman.

In 2000, Stein followed a girlfriend from Montana to Charleston, South Carolina, where they ended up living for a year in a friend’s parents’ house on the ocean. He began studying music at the College of Charleston, but on the recommendation of saxophonist Ben Abarbanel-Wolff, whom he’d met at Bennington, in 2001 he transferred to the University of Michigan. In the 1990s its prestigious jazz program, led by saxophonist Donald Walden, had graduated adventurous musicians such as Colin Stetson, Matt Bauder, Stuart Bogie, and Toby Summerfield. During the three years Stein spent in Ann Arbor, he made regular trips to Chicago, where pianist and childhood friend Paul Giallorenzo had settled after finishing his studies at Northwestern.

“I remember coming in and playing some gigs at Phyllis’ Musical Inn, and I thought it was really exciting,” Stein says. He made friends with many musicians who were becoming important in the Chicago scene, among them Keefe Jackson, cornetist Josh Berman, and drummers Mike Reed and J

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

continued from 27 Frank Rosaly. During this time he also played with veteran reedist Ken Vandermark, and after one more relocation—to Austin, Texas, for about six months in 2004—Stein ended up moving to Chicago in early 2005, lured in part

by Vandermark’s proposal to start a quartet with him, drummer Tim Daisy, and bassist Nate McBride. The group would be called Bridge 61.

Stein found living quarters for $100 a month in the old Humboldt Park church basement that also housed performance space 3030, and in 2006 he appeared on his first record: the sole Bridge 61 album, Journal. “When Bridge 61 started happening, I felt this strong sense to keep making records, doing this thing I had seen Ken and Tim and a lot of those guys doing,” Stein says.

After landing a gig at New York club Tonic in 2007, Stein put together the first iteration of Locksmith Isidore with Pride and cellist Kevin Davis. The group released increasingly strong albums in 2008, ’09, and ’10, with Roebke replacing Davis after the first; also in 2009, Stein put out an impressive solo record called In Exchange for a Process. In 2011 an earlier version of his quartet (with Rosaly on drums) dropped The Story This Time, but by then he was rethinking his modus operandi.

“I wanted to go back in the shed and play more,” Stein says. “It wasn’t something I thought about at first—you just make a shitload of records and see what happens. And after doing it for a year or two, I realized it didn’t suit me. But I was working in a lot of other bands, and that made me comfortable— because I still felt relevant or whatever, and I was still on records. I really like working as a sideman, and I love touring in other people’s bands; it’s really fun and easy as opposed to being a bandleader.” In the years since this reorientation, Stein has played on albums by several other people, including Roebke, Rosaly, Reed, trumpeter Russ Johnson, oboist Kyle Bruckmann, and drummer Charles Rumback. Not till Lucille! would he take top billing again.

For most of his time in Chicago, Stein earned his living teaching private lessons in the suburbs, and the flexible schedule this work afforded him became more important after his daughter was born in 2014. By then Amy had become a major figure in the comedy world, and she’d been pushing him to do shows with her for years—since shortly after she placed fourth on Last Comic Standing in 2007. But Stein always demurred: “I would say,

28 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. What would I do? Nobody wants to see that.’ It was a running theme for a long time.”

When Schumer asked again in May 2015, it was different. “It was the first time that she proposed it where I actually knew someone who ran a venue where I could ask about doing a show spontaneously,” Stein says. “I could see it happen in my head, and it didn’t seem insane.” He called Mike Reed, who owns Constellation, about hosting a concert the following evening. This became a pattern: whenever Schumer would fly into town to hang out with Stein’s family, they’d throw together a gig a day in advance. The shows consistently sold out with nothing more than a ticket announcement—something Stein has never been able to count on at his own performances.

Still, when Schumer suggested doing a tour together, he wasn’t moved. “I thought, ‘Sounds fun—it’ll never happen,’ ” he says.

“Touring for her at that time was still at standard comedy clubs. But then I got an e-mail from her and her booking agent saying, ‘OK, the tour is set, can you do all of these dates?

They’re going to be at arenas.’ ” Partway through the time he spent opening for Schumer, Stein gave up teaching private lessons, not just because scheduling them had become too difficult but also because he was making real money on the road.

“I think he’s gotten a lot more outspoken and confident over the past few years, for unsurprising reasons,” says Giallorenzo, who plays with Stein in the long-running trio Hearts & Minds. “That comes across in his playing. I think doing these shows with his sister, speaking to the crowd, and generally sharing some of the spotlight with her has definitely made him a lot more comfortable in his own skin.”

Now that Stein isn’t regularly touring with Schumer, he’s returned to solidifying his own projects. The quartet on Lucille! has no current plans to tour, but he’s got other irons in the fire: next spring Locksmith Isidore will release an album on Northern Spy, this fall Hearts & Minds will cut a studio record, and Stein will soon begin working in a promising new quartet with saxophonist Greg Ward, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Jim Black.

Stein seems genuinely content to be operating on a smaller scale again. “I’m a bass clarinetist,” he says. “There’s no ‘Oh man, now I’m doing the big time.’” v

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SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of September 28

MUSIC

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ALL AGES

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THURSDAY28 PICK OF THE WEEK

Japanese Breakfast gets expansive on Soft Sounds From Another Planet

Ballister 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b Few if any working improvised music ensembles hit the listener with as much blunt force and manic energy as Ballister, the trio of saxophonist Dave Rempis, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. In February the group dropped Slag (Aerophonic), a live recording of a coruscating performance at London’s Café Oto in 2015. The following month Ballister dropped a second album, Low Level Stink (Dropa Disc), a recording of a performance at Antwerp’s Oorstof concert series in March 2015. Both releases have the ability to clear out mental cobwebs like an industrial-strength fan, yet as much as their music is typified by frequent, ferocious, high-volume sallies, it would be unfair to reduce the group’s efforts to a single extreme. Passages where the ensemble cools its jets and navigates moments of repose are rare, but they make an impact; in the first moments of the improvisation that opens the second side of Low Level Stink, slow-moving, stuttering beats open space for sensual double stops from Lonberg-Holm and soulful alto pleading from Rempis that briefly evoke the music of Julius Hemphill with Abdul Wadud. Still, the real action tends to occur when Ballister’s operating at full-tilt, a chronic condition on Slag. Once the listener gets behind the trio’s sheer fury, a sense of exhilaration comes through. On the opening track, “Fauchard,” the cellist charges through the saxophonist’s fire-breathing while the drummer seems to translate and sonically magnify the rippling of water, focusing action on his snare—striking and rubbing some kind of metal object on his drum, and enhancing the sounds with cymbal patter. The piece opens even further as Lonberg-Holm provides upper-register cello bowing and slithering electronic noise and Rempis adds ghostly, snaking alto tones before momentum pushes the trio into another high-speed collision. Slag is no easy slog, but as with most Ballister music, surrender to the attack opens up a whole new world of sonic experience. —PETER MARGASAK

ò EBRU YILDIZ

JAPANESE BREAKFAST, MANNEQUIN PUSSY, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE Wed 10/4, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, $15, $13 in advance. 17+

MICHELLE ZAUNER LAUNCHED Japanese Breakfast as a solo project amid massive life chang-

es. In 2014, while fronting her Philly emo band Little Big League, her mother was diagnosed

with Stage IV cancer, and Zauner eventually moved back home to Oregon to be with her family.

Her mother passed away just months before Zauner wrote Japanese Breakfast’s 2016 debut,

Psychopomp. That loss, along with graceful reflections on the distinct challenges of adulthood,

colors the moving, slightly lo-fi indie-rock record. July’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet

(Dead Oceans) retains the tranquil atmospheres found on its predecessor even as Zauner and

her band go expansive (quite literally on the hypnotic opener, “Diving Woman,” which is nearly

twice the length of the longest track on Psychopomp). Ambitious and slightly ungainly, Soft

Sounds wins because Japanese Breakfast takes chances with its relatively calm, shoegaze-

influenced sounds—“Machinist” rolls out over a sturdy dance beat, and flourishes with a funky

nimble bass line and glitzy keys. —LEOR GALIL

30 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Gigan Of Wolves, Air Raid, and the Everscathed open. 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $15, $12 in advance. 17+ Giant monster name, giant monster band. It’s been four years since Chicago transplants Gigan released their mind-melting Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery and Super Science—a title that accurately describes the album’s apocalyptic technical-death and space-rock-on-steroids sounds. With their brand-new Undulating Waves of Rainbiotic Iridescence (Willowtip), they hone their whirling sonic blades until they cut through bone. Like their previous two records, Undulating Waves was recorded with Sanford Parker (in California this time), but it’s the band’s first album with new vocalist Jerry Kavouriaris, who establishes himself as a commanding figurehead at the front of this evil ship while drummer Nate Cotton and founder/core multiinstrumentalist Eric Hersemann (previously of Hate Eternal and Lord Blasphemer) sail through interstel-

Cardi B ò DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS

lar storms and straight into the heart of the blackened sun. There isn’t a single point in this 55-minute album when a listener can afford to let his or her guard down—Gigan’s aggressively challenging sound is as dense and evocative as songs with titles like “Hideous Wailing of the Ronowen During Nightshade” and “Clockwork With Thunderous Hooves” ought to be. From the first shiverings and shamblings, you know you’ve entered a zone where earth rules no longer apply. —MONICA KENDRICK

FRIDAY29 Cardi B Young Thug, headlines; A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, Cardi B, Young M.A, and PnB Rock open. 8 PM, UIC Pavilion, 525 S. Racine, $50-$120. b Bronx-bred hip-hop artist Belcalis Almanzar, best known as Cardi B, built a career off her big personality, first as a stripper of local lore, then as an Instagram celebrity with a giant following (current stats: 9.7 million followers) before blossoming as a cast member on VH1’s Love & Hip Hop: New York in late 2015. Roughly a year later, she left the program to focus on her music career, which she approaches with a business acumen as steely as her rapping.

As she recently told the Fader, “I have a passion for music, I love music. But I also have a passion for money and paying my bills.” Cardi’s survival instinct has helped her develop an ecumenical attitude toward hip-hop, and like many pop musicians before her, she cobbles underground and mainstream trends together to find something that’ll spark. On “Pull Up,” off March’s Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 2 (KSR), she slips into the bellicose double-time flow G Herbo and Lil Bibby perfected on 2012’s “Kill Shit.” “Bodak Yellow” (Atlantic) borrows from Kodak Black’s “No Flockin” flow—both artists draw out the ends of each line flowing from one syllable to the

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next, but while Black delivers them like sighs, Cardi stomps on the beat. When she’s at her best, Cardi renders her source material irrelevant—her husky voice and boisterous energy elevated “Bodak Yellow” into a late-summer smash. —LEOR GALIL

Broken Social Scene Frightened Rabbit and Belle Game open. 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence, $36. 18+ You can’t talk about Canadian indie rock in the 2000s without Broken Social Scene, in part because the group is a community unto itself. This small musical army’s ranks include members of Metric, Stars, KC Accidental, Do Make Say Think, Apostle of Hustle, and an indomitable face of indie-pop crossover success, Feist. But as much as their grand, driven, and sometimes intimate style is representative of indie rock in the aughties, Broken Social Scene aren’t anchored by the past. On their first album in seven years, July’s Hug of Thunder (Arts & Crafts), they’re resilient and effervescent, rolling with the instrumental sunbursts and mellow melodies key to much of their best material. The 15 musicians who contributed to Hug of Thunder have managed to keep Broken Social Scene a firm unit, but their approach is pliable—the hint of chromium 80s Manchester postpunk they apply to “Please Take Me With You” enhances the song’s doleful melody and lighter-than-air ambience. —LEOR GALIL

Derv Gordon So What and Jollys open.

7 PM, East Room, 2354 N. Milwaukee, $20, $15 in advance. 21+ Very few bands can claim to be equally revered by lovers of psych, mod, ska, punk, funk, R&B, disco,

glam, and bubblegum pop, and had a racially integrated lineup in the turbulent 60s—and had hits.

The Equals were such a band, though sadly in the States they were known mostly as a footnote to Eddy “Electric Avenue” Grant’s career. My gateway to their music was their monstrously modfuzzed “I Can See but You Don’t Know,” which I heard on a psych comp in the 90s, and there was no going back. The band dipped their toes in a plethora of genres, but all of the music that came out—characterized by uber-catchy choruses, punky handclaps, Afrocentric grooves, and unparalleled energy and urgency—was undeniably their own. Formed in a council flat in the UK in 1965, the Equals featured Grant, twin brothers Derv and Lincoln Gordon, and Caucasian musicians John Hall and Pat Lloyd. Their 1968 breakout single, “Baby Come Back,” with its pop-ska rhythm, reached number one in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK—and an impressive #32 on the U.S. charts (it was later covered by Bonnie Raitt in 1982). More hits followed, including the pure pop “I Get So Excited,” the blistering protofunk “Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys” and “Stand Up and Be Counted,” and the poppy “Michael and the Slipper Tree.” The sleek 1976 disco single “Funky Like a Train” has been reissued multiple times, and the Clash covered the punky “Police on My Back.” Four years ago, SF native and megafan Jason Duncan took on the task of writing a book on the Equals, and when he tracked down Derv Gordon in London for an interview, he mentioned his band So What would be honored to back him for a special one-off show.

That gig happened in May of this year, and in July So What joined Gordon for a full west-coast tour.

Now Chicago is lucky enough to have this living legend perform nearly all the crucial tunes mentioned above—miss this once-in-a-lifetime event at your own peril. —STEVE KRAKOW J

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SATURDAY30 Wand, Peacers Darto opens. 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $15, 18+ Three years ago, Cory Hanson’s LA band Wand released three albums of melodically rich psychrock in 13 months. The group then fell silent, but Hanson didn’t slow down: last year he dropped his first solo record, The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo (Drag City), whose muted chamber-pop employs more elaborate arrangements than Wand’s old material. This approach bleeds beautifully into the band’s new release Plum (Drag City), performed by an agile five-piece that gracefully pivots from dreamy pop tunes to slashing hard rock.

On “Charles de Gaulle” Hanson sings about the Beatles coming to the U.S. “to start their empire of music to infect the land,” and he clearly considers himself a subject of that empire. Keyboardist Sofia Arreguin weaves baroque patterns through dueling riffs from Hanson and fellow guitarist Robbie Cody, and the songs traverse gentle valleys and muscular peaks, often taking surprising detours— into the pedal steel-sopped languor of “The Trap,” for instance, or the needling, spasmodic pulse and sweet-toned, patient vocals of “White Cat,” or the episodic sprawl of album closer “Driving.”

On his second album as the Peacers, Introducing the Crimsmen (Drag City), veteran Bay Area psych merchant Mike Donovan leads a nimble fourpiece working band that heightens the nuance and dynamic range of his twisted tunes while retaining the shambolic, damaged vibe that colors all his projects (he was also the mastermind of the defunct Sic Alps). The distended rhythms recall the solo work of Syd Barrett, with raw melodies and ramshackle guitars drifting in and out of focus—it’s deliciously out of sync, each song existing as a tantalizing glimpse

of what it might’ve been. Donovan and company could surely polish up their music, but the fuzzy edges give it its charm. —PETER MARGASAK

Lea Bertucci 8 PM, Bond Chapel, University of Chicago, 1025 E. 58th. F b I first encountered Lea Bertucci’s music when she was playing bass clarinet on the 2014 album L’Onde Souterraine (Telegraph Harp), a series of visceral yet meditative duet improvisations with cellist Leila Bordreuil. The music she’s released since then has revealed a broad and fascinating artistic practice often focused on the acoustics of specific spaces.

“Cepheid Variations,” the first of two tracks on her terrific All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (NNA Tapes), was composed for Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room, and features Bordreuil and violist Jeanann Dara, who play striated, long tones rich in ghostly harmonics that Bertucci processes into a haunting collision of overtones and reverberation. More salient to her research in acoustics is the second piece, “Double Bass Crossfade,” which starts with James Ilgenfritz and Sean Ali positioned in opposite corners of a 50,000-square-foot space with wirelessly amplified double basses, playing bowed long tones that toy with heavy vibrato and then none at all.

Over the course of the 30-minute piece, they slowly move toward one another while playing inverse parts, then switch parts and continue till they each reach the other’s starting position. Naturally, a stereo recording can’t convey what a live performance can reveal, which is why I’m excited to experience Bertucci in concert. This weekend she’ll be playing work from a forthcoming solo album, due next year from NNA Tapes. As yet untitled, it features field recordings from places such as Mayan pyramids and forgotten urban beaches, and alto saxophone in pulsing minimalist figures, overblown drones, and upper register squalls (sometimes looped and overdubbed) that spill and corrode in waves of overtones, microtones, and psychoacoustic effects.

This combination creates fascinating conversa- J

Lucia Cifarelli of KMFDM ò HUNZAS666/FLICKR

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Lea Bertucci ò ANDY HARDMAN

32 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Comfort Station Benefit Several excellent locals—Ryley Walker, Negative Scanner, Bloodiest, and more—play in front of the Logan Square monument to raise funds for tiny multidisciplinary arts space the Comfort Station. 9/30, Illinois Centennial Monument, 2595 N. Milwaukee, comfortstationlogansquare.org, $20 suggested donation. b

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MUSIC

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Fleet Foxes ò SHAWN BRACKBILL

continued from 32

tions between what she plays acoustically and how it fills a particular space. —PETER MARGASAK

TUESDAY3 Fleet Foxes See also Wednesday. Nap Eyes open. 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, $36-$50.50. F

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In the six years between this summer, when Fleet Foxes dropped its third studio album, Crack-Up (Nonesuch), and its 2011 predecessor, Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop), the band seems to have been blamed for the trend of countless lamentable rock bands that present monochromatic gang shouting as some kind of campfire-grade profundity (does anyone even remember Mumford & Sons or Lumineers?). Of course, that’s not fair or accurate; at its best, the Northwest five-piece brought gorgeous, stark vocal harmonies to the songs of lead vocalist and songwriter Robin Pecknold with the precision and soul missing from the shitty bands to emerge in their wake. Plus, Pecknold wrote songs with an affecting beauty the other groups haven’t been able to match. I had long assumed the band was kaput until I heard news of the new record, and while I’m not particularly interested in how Pecknold’s quest for perfection crippled his ability to create for a number of years, as he’s described in an interview with NPR, I was happy to hear a new batch of tunes from the band. That said, too many of the songs on the ambitious new album fall a bit flat; they’re weighed down by the grandeur of the multipartite arrangements, and the opulence isn’t always memorable. On the other hand, there are moments that are so undeniably gorgeous and moving that I don’t care about the passages infected by excess. “Third of May/Odaigahara” soars and floats in waves before falling away to silence to let Pecknold’s voice ring out before they join in again; “Fool’s Errand” piles one bittersweet hook after another into an episodic gem. It’s to the band’s credit that the songs never collapse under their own weight, and while the record could have been more concise, it’s nice to encounter such aspiration during a time when mediocrity seems par for the course. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY4 Fleet FOxes See Tuesday. Nap Eyes open.

7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, $36$50.50. b Sam Amidon Ty Maxon opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $17, $15 in advance. 18+ On every recording it seems like singer Sam Amidon eagerly shares new insights, knowledge, and experiences he’s gained since his last work.

Throughout his career he’s consistently stretched the boundaries of folk music to the breaking point. Much of his repertoire is based upon or borrows from artifacts in the public domain but everything he does feels alive and charged by the world around him. On the superb new The Following Mountain (Nonesuch) several songs feature an unlikely collaborator, free-jazz percussionist Milford Graves, whose magnificent polymetric style is effectively folded into song form on “Ghosts” and who contributes drums to a thrilling group improvisation on “April” (Amidon has previously collaborated with jazz musicians like Kenny Wheeler and Bill Frisell). On original songs like “Fortune” Amidon sings lyrics that cut to the quick with elemental truths, expressing his folly in trying to come to grips with the indifferent, personalized manifestation of fortune. On “Ghosts” he nasally chants over his own droning violin and the irregular throb of Graves’s drumming—neatly processed into the massive sound of an echo chamber by producer Leo Abrahams— to create the kind of handmade minimalism found in Tony Conrad’s music. “Another Story Told” offers a repeating acoustic guitar arpeggio and simple drum machine beats before the atmospheric guitar textures of Shahzad Ismaily, the occasional punchy drum beat from Chris Vatalaro, and probing, grainy violin from Amidon push the tune into some elusive fusion of free jazz and folk that adds up to something more. Amidon is a charming performer and a witty storyteller—onstage he seems to have trouble sticking to a single thread, which gives his concerts a wonderful air of unpredictability that entertains and beguiles. Tonight he’s joined by Vatalaro and guest bassist Matt Lux. —PETER MARGASAK J

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for complete listings, tickets, and social updates... martyrslive.com facebook.com/martyrslive @martyrslive SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

MUSIC continued from 34 Cortex 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+

The fiery Norwegian quartet Cortex pull no punches with their new album, barreling through eight new tunes without a wasted gesture—although its title, Avant-Garde Party Music (Clean Feed), suggests they’re not above laughing at themselves a bit. With five albums to their credit, trumpeter Thomas Johansson—who composed all of the typically pithy material on the recording—saxophonist Kristoffer Berre Alberts, bassist Ola Høyer, and drummer Gard Nilssen have hit an undeniable groove as a working band, delivering some of the most thrilling, high-energy freebop made anywhere in the world. The rhythm section functions like a jet engine, driving the music with a dazzling blend of precision and power. The opening section of “Grinder” gamely ambles with a swinging exuberance before the explosive horn solos usher in a manic onslaught of high velocity movement, Nilssen moving across his kit with blindingly quick patterns and thudding physicality and Høyer plucking notes in up-and-down shapes that push the music forward while filling in gaps in the compositions.

The front line references plenty of antecedents in jazz history—from Ornette Coleman’s classic quar-

36 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

tet to the moody machinations of fellow Scandinavians Atomic—but Johansson and Alberts can just as easily scream and casually deploy extended techniques. The sheer enthusiasm with which they rip into the tunes, their nonstop energy, and the exhilarating cogency of their improvisations make the band more than just another bunch of virtuosos—they play as if it might be the last time they take the stage, but rather than transmitting desperation, they sound as if they’re having the best night of their lives. —PETER MARGASAK

Ka Baird Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $12. 21+.

Ka (née Kathleen) Baird is half of Spires That in the Sunset Rise. While the ensemble has been based in Decatur, Chicago, and Madison, and its recent LP title Illinois Glossolalia (Feeding Tube) attests to their enduring midwestern connection, Baird now lives in New York. Since moving there she’s performed and recorded as a solo artist, first releasing a tape and an LP under the name Sapropelic Pycnic, and now assigning that title to her first solo album. Working alone, Baird pursues a more layered approach on Sapropelic Pycnic than she does with Spires, stacking loops and breath-paced passages of strings, woodwinds, and her vibrato-laden voice

Ka Baird ò MARCIA BASSETT

into incantatory songs and vertiginous instrumental pieces. Song titles like “Transmigration” and “Metamorphoses” suggest that the music is about transformational processes, but Baird’s mysterious music tends to suggest more than it explains. While the LP is pretty absorbing, one hopes that this solo set taps

into the compelling stage presence she’s projected at recent Spires concerts. Shifting between voice, instruments, and effects pedals, she is like a shamanic switchwoman conducting sonic spirit trains that travel at breakneck speed but never collide.

—BILL MEYER v

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You can go back to school, too!

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New adult group classes are now open! Browse our class schedules online at oldtownschool.org

please recycle this paper SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

FOOD & DRINK RESTAURANT REVIEW

Heritage Restaurant & Caviar Bar is more than bigticket fish eggs

A varied menu of imaginative, well-executed food—from Eastern European to Korean—should endear this spot to Humboldt Park.

By MIKE SULA

H

Caviar is served with rye bread, potato chips, pickled vegetables, as well as butter and traditional garnishes. ò CAROLINE MANRIQUE

38 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

eritage Restaurant & Caviar Bar opened in early August, the week of the Sturgeon Moon, which is when the Algonquins believed the Great Lakes teemed with gravid fish. That’s not only auspicious, it’s audacious, because this intimate space that once housed the late, lamented Bar Marta stocks up to 16 varieties of fish eggs iced behind glass on the bar.

I have good friends living around this somewhat lonely stretch of Chicago Avenue who took umbrage when this restaurant announced itself. Caviar, as we’ve all been taught, is the food of fat cats; the rich, greedy, and powerful who would sooner kick a wheedling urchin to the curb than toss him a kopeck. Though it’s changing rapidly, this neck of Humboldt Park hasn’t completely lost its working-class charm, and a place slinging $145 dollops of Royal Belgian osetra gold might seem like it doesn’t belong.

On the other hand, the principals behind this project maintain that, circa pre- and post-Prohibition, caviar was frequently served in Chicago bars—sometimes for free; it was as proletarian as pickled eggs and peanuts. I guess nothing works up a thirst like some salty Idaho-raised American white sturgeon roe. Alas, it’s not free at Heritage, where a 12-gram serving is $59, or $113 for 30 grams. Truthfully, these onyx-colored eggs are only gently salty, but when you place a

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HERITAGE RESTAURANT & CAVIAR BAR | $$$ R 2700 W. Chicago 773-661-9577 heritage-chicago.com

FOOD & DRINK

argentine atmosphere while you dine

king crab house

open now OYSTER BAR SPECIALS Wings .35 ea • Oysters .65 ea Shrimp .90 ea • Mussels 5.95 Spicy Shrimp 9.95

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restaurant & bar 210 0 we st division st .

7 7 3 . 2 9 2 .1 6 0 0 Pork chop with Carolina Gold rice grits and a kimchi of oysters, jalapeño, and Hatch chiles ò CAROLINE MANRIQUE

small mother-of-pearl spoonful on the roof of your mouth, they do pop on the tongue with a seductive creaminess that will leave you sad you can’t afford more.

There is plenty more, though. Served on an iced dish, premium caviar varieties come with additional gobs of golden whitefish roe and red tobiko as consolation, which seems a bit like seating Beyoncé next to Kenny G. It’s served along with terrific black Russian rye bread, buttered, lightly toasted, and imbued with cocoa powder and molasses; thin, friedto-order Kennebec potato chips, and tart pickled carrots and cucumbers that almost manifest as a Mexican escabeche. Soft white butter and a circular tray of traditional garnishes (sour cream, chopped egg, red onions, and scallions) complete a presentation that is dramatic and generous. It’s far too much food for 12 grams of caviar—which I’d recommend eating completely on its own anyway—but it’s good to eat all on its own as well.

Other varieties of caviar are offered a la carte at different weights, generally lower prices, and significantly more noticeable salt levels, at least in the case of the wild rainbow trout roe ($15 for 15 grams).

Did you think Heritage was going to get by on caviar alone? Of course not. There’s a seasoned chef-owner at work here. Guy Meikle,

formerly of Bridgeport’s much-loved Nana, has also assembled a more financially accessible menu that skews eastern European, with a few curveballs, notably toward Korea, like a grilled vegetable ramen with a doenjang base, grilled baby back ribs rubbed in spicy gochujang, and luscious king crab legs rubbed and broiled with tobiko, gochuchang, and lemon aioli.

If you’re still pining for sea creatures to supplement your bread, pickles, and chips, there are oysters and smoked fish such as citrusy gravlax, shredded hot smoked trout dusted in togarashi and lime, or pleasantly dry sturgeon cured with black pepper, lemon, and horseradish.

A critical order is the velvety fennelpollen-dusted potato soup—built on oysterand-crab stock and sheltering a crispy fritter formed from whipped ham, mackerel, and cured tuna belly—topped with a smidge of Louisiana bowfin caviar. Thick-skinned pelmeni filled with ground duck and foie gras, and sauced with reduced plum liqueur offer a sturdier dumpling alternative to the stout, chewy potato-and-cottage-cheese pierogi, plated on sauerkraut with charred purple cauliflower and dried beet chips.

While the majority of Meikle’s menu is designed for noshing, he does provide J

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FOOD & DRINK continued from 39 a few entree-size plates, including panfried lake perch with succotash and wild rice, and an aged rib eye with buckwheat-foie gras golumpki. One evening I feasted on an impossibly juicy pork chop gilded with a superabundance of butterkase-and-cotija Carolina Gold rice grits and a kimchi of oysters, jalapeño, and Hatch chiles. On another occasion I was crestfallen by a sizable quantity of duck overroasted throughout into gray leather. The canine in my home was pleased with it, but at least I was too with the fluffy Czech-style dumpling that came smothered in giblet gravy on the side.

Fortunately that’s something you can order on its own from the a la carte section of the menu, along with a whimsical outlier: fluffy, crispy, togarashi-dusted curly fries with Dijon-and-sriracha aioli.

Desserts by pastry chef Alan Krueger match the memorability of his bread work, featuring a depthlessly rich pot de creme and a Downy-soft espresso souffle—polar opposites in terms of density but kindred in their appeal.

Heritage boasts a fascinating beverage program that well complements the highly

varied nature of the menu. Partner, general manager, and beverage director Jan Henrichson infuses a few vodka shots, ideal for the raw seafood—one spiced with gochuchang, another herbaceous with tarragon, each garnished with bread and pickles. Her wine list is mined with intriguing and uncommon bottles from central and eastern Europe, and it’s a pleasure to explore varieties like creamy orange pinot gris from Slovenia; dry, cherrylike rosé from Croatia; or bold, ripe zweigelt from Austria.

Most people will never know what it’s like to eat 675 grams of caviar, but if I saw a giant comet approaching I’m pretty sure I could consume Heritage’s entire inventory in one sitting. Yet until that happens I wonder whether the place can sustain that highly perishable aspect of its business model in Humboldt Park. This block doesn’t have the foot traffic of too many fat cats that can afford it with much regularity. And yet Heritage deserves its place in the neighborhood, simply for its broad, imaginative, largely well-executed, and affordable concept that ought to be appreciated by all. v

v @MikeSula

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Pierogi, plated on sauerkraut with charred purple cauliflower and dried beet chips ò CAROLINE MANRIQUE

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○ Watch a video of Bill Walker working in the kitchen with Rose Pork Brain in Milk Gravy at chicagoreader.com/food.

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Deep-fried pork brain with haricots verts tossed with sesame vinaigrette, topped with sesame seeds and togarashi, and garnished with cilantro. ò JULIA THIEL

B

ILL WALKER, chef at the KENNISON, has nothing against offal. He’s even open to brains as long as they’re fresh. But when Stephen Hasson of Ugo’s challenged Walker to create a dish with ROSE PORK BRAIN IN MILK GRAVY, Walker struggled with the fact that the product comes in a can. For one thing, its smell and taste reminded him of another canned meat—namely, cat food. “[The brains are] just off-putting in a pink paste of milk gravy in a can,” he says.

Pork brains are traditional in southern cuisine, especially in the breakfast dish known as brains and eggs, which usually consists of pork or calf brains that are panfried and then scrambled with eggs. Brains have fallen out of favor over the years, though, and two other brands of canned pork brains in milk gravy— Armour and Kelly’s—have been discontinued, making Rose the only canned pork brains currently being produced.

Walker and his cooks tasted the brains straight out the can and concluded that “the smell is more off-putting than the taste,” Walker says. “The texture’s really strange.

They just disintegrate in your mouth—not in a good way. They’re not very pleasant.”

To improve their texture, Walker dredged the pork brains in flour, cornstarch, salt, and

pepper and deep-fried them. “It’s supposed to play on a dish that I always get when I go to Sticky Rice, which has ground Chinese sausages that they then fry with green beans,” he says. “I was looking for some sort of heavy flavor profiles and umami bombs that can cover up some of the funk of the pork brain.”

In Walker’s dish, the brains stood in for the sausages. He stir-fried haricots verts with garlic and tossed them with a sesame vinaigrette, adding sesame seeds and togarashi (a Japanese spice blend that typically includes chiles, orange peel, ginger, garlic, and seaweed). Plating the green beans with the fried brains and a sprinkle of cilantro, he admitted, “I’m trying to mask the flavor of the brains here. They don’t smell as bad once they’re cooked, though.”

Tasting the dish proved more pleasant than Walker expected. He says, “It’s almost like chicken.”

WHO’S NEXT:

Walker has challenged JOSHUA MARRELLI at STANDARD MARKET to create a dish with AJI AMARILLO, a chile native to South America and common in Peruvian cuisine. v

v @juliathiel

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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.

FUNDRAISING - FALL HARVEST OF CASH- Looking for a few old pros. Start today! Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035 ask for Cash.

General Architectural Designers II for Perkins Eastman Architects, DPC to work at our Chicago, IL loc. Pos responsible for Masterplanning + arch design, study building layouts + adjacencies for hospitality, retail, + mixed-use projects; Intergrate building plans w/ site plans; Integrate interior layouts w/ ext envelope studies. Collab w/ design team to ID design criteria for new construction renovs; Participate in dev criteria for choosing materials based on cost + time impacts; Coord team communications when directed by team leaders; Maintain docs sharing standards for team; Participate in project doc prep incl drawings, specs, ID materials + equipment. Plan layout of projects + integrate eng’g elements into design. Prep scale drawings + docs. Prep for + participate in client presentations. Plan layouts for interior arch dev. Study energy use implications of design options, using design software for analysis + presentation. Study façade + envelope assembly choices + details relating to cladding materials, moisture protection, energy efficiency, costs + constructability. Work w/ Revit + Rhino + Sketch up. Impl computer sims for design. Use realistic rendering engines, animation software, + Adobe CS. Create 3D models. Must have Master’s in Arch and 2 yrs exp to incl senior living and mixed-use projects and 1 yr exp in hospitality projects. Al-

so req the following skills: (2 yrs exp) with Revit and Rhino. Resume to perecruiter@ perkinseastman.com with the subject line Architectural Designer II – CW – Chicago – your name.

THE NORTHERN TRUST CO. is seeking a Sr. Consultant, Database Administrator in Chicago IL, with the following requirements: BS in Engineering, Comp. Sci. or Info. Tech. and 8 years related experience. Prior exp. must include the following: install, upgrade, patch, expand, and maintain Oracle Exadata clusters including patching of firmware, storage cells, InfiniBand, compute nodes, and databases (2 yrs); design and implement conflict resolution multidirectional Golden Gate solutions for Oracle 11g and 12c multi-tenant Exadata databases (2 yrs); design and implement Oracle databases using RAC and Data Guard on Oracle Exadata clusters (4 yrs); automate capacity planning, performance tuning, and the management of multi-Oracle database environments using OEM, unix shell scripts, pl/sql code, and sqlplus scripts (6 yrs). Please apply on-line at www.northerntrustcareers.com and search for Req. #17123

Business Management Analysts (Chicago, IL): (Multi Openings) Analyze & modify operations, mngmnt, systems functions & processes of organization to increase efficiency & performance. Identify problems & potential areas for improvement; recommend & implmnt soltns for identified problems. Calculate & demonstrate financial impact of proposed improvements on client’s bottom line. Reqmnts: Master’s dgr in Eng’g, Bus admi, Global Mngmnt or rel’d & 2 yrs of exp in either job offered, overseeing production, quality assurance, operations or rel’d.

Must’ve exp working in manufacturing or industrial eng’g. Travel within U.S. & internationally to client’s sites 50% of time. Mail resume to M. Jakubowska, VP Recruiting, Argo, Inc., 455 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive, Suite 2750, Chicago, IL60611. Please ref job id#: 41. EEOE. TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY MANAGER, SALESFORCE TECHNOLOGY (MULT. POS.),

PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Develop Salesforce tech-enabled soltns that address the needs of large orgs., including those that streamline organizational needs & meet legal & industry-specific compliance standards & regs. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, IT, Engg or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progressive rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, IT, Engg or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Must have 1 of the following Salesforce.com certifications: Certified Administrator, Certified Developer, or Certified Sales /Service Consultant. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1443, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

BLUE SOFTWARE IS seeking a

Director, Product Support in Chicago, IL with the following requirements: BS in Computer Science, Engineering or Management Information Systems plus 3 years related experience. Prior experience must include: design and implement workflow and asset management systems in consumer packaging for pharmaceutical companies (3 yrs); develop user stories and test plans in agile development methodology (3 yrs); design SQL queries for accessing data and reporting in Microsoft SQL Server (2 yrs); manage projects and communicate designs and stories to all levels of company and client (2 yrs). Please apply on-line at: https://blue-software1. hiringthing.com/job/52088/directorproduct-support

DOG CAREGIVER: PREMIER

dog facility in the south loop seeks experienced DOG LOVER to work full time with our dogs. We carefully screen dogs for safety and compatibility (do NOT discriminate against breeds). All staff work as a team to deliver high quality service and care. Drama not permitted.

Competitive compensation and health insurance. Go to our website: www.dogonefunchicago.com to complete an application or send resume to bpetrunich@dogonefunchicago.com

VP, Business Intelligence & Engineering: Resp for development & delivery of data driven solutions for improving marketing performance & understanding of consumer insights. Manage growth, management, retention & satisfaction of assigned client portfolios & work across the org to deliver measurable business outcomes.

Chicago, IL location. Req’s MS in Comp Sci & 4 yrs exp in job offered. Send resume to VNC Comm’s, Inc. dba Performics, 111 E Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL, 60601, Attn: H. Blackston.

OUTSIDE SALES REP, EMS

Corporate is looking for closers. If you have sales experience, enjoy face to face selling and have a reliable work history. We offer a Base + Comm + Bonuses + Benefits. Call to apply 847-543-4050

TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY MANAGER, APPLICATION TECHNOLOGY (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Help clnts determine the best apps for bus. needs & integrate new & existing apps into bus. including Mobility integration. Req. a Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Info Tech, Electronic Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progressive rel. work exp.; OR Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Info Tech, Electronic Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel req. up to 80%.

Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1426, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Boulevard, Tampa, FL 33607.

MICROSOFT CORPORATION currently has the following openings

HYATT CORPORATION SEEKS A STAFF FULL STACK DEVELOPER in Chicago, IL to work on eCommerce, marketing projects, and new groundbreaking applications designed for Hyatt hotel associates and guests. BS & 2 yrs. For full req’s and to apply submit cover letter and resume to: Hyatt Corporation, Attn: Mecca Wilkinson, 150 N. Riverside Plaza, Chicago, IL 60606

DRIVERS - Regional & OTR LCL is expanding & seeks drivers to run regionally & OTR. *AVG $58,000.00 - $70,000.00 +/yr *$2000.00 Sign on *Weekly payroll *FULL BENEFITS & MORE!!!

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in Chicago, IL (job opportunities available at all levels, e.g., Principal, Senior and Lead levels):

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

42 CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Enhance the customer rltinshp from a capability dvlpmnt perspective by articulating the value of our services.

Requires travel up to 50% w/work to be performed at various unknown worksites throughout the U.S. Telecommuting permitted. https://jobs- microsoft.icims.com/ jobs/8520/go/job Multiple positions available.

To view detailed job descriptions and minimum requirements, and to apply, visit the website address listed. EOE.

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Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030 SUMMERTIME SAVINGS! NEWLY Remod. 1 BR Apts $650 w/

gas incl. 2-5BR start at $650 & up.

Sec 8 Welc. Rental Assistance Prog. for Qualified Applicants offer up to $ 400/month for 1 yr. (773)412-1153 Wesley Realty FALL SPECIAL: Studios starting at $499 incls utilities, 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 2BR $699, With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside.

312-656-5066 or 773-287-9999

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)

CHICAGO, 1BR/STUDIO. $635 /MO & $595/mo. + security. Heated, newly decorated, appliances, 709 W. Garfield. 1-773-881-4182

CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up.

Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-3880170

6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

S. SHORE - 73rd & Constance. 1BR,

Search Engine Optimization Associate: plan & develop SEO & PPC strategies for clients.

Bach. in CS and 2y exp. req. Mail res. to Proceed Innovative LLC, 1501 E Woodfield Rd, #200N, Schaumburg, IL 60173

STUDIO $500-$599

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

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888

Senior Quantitative Trader Dvlp trading strategies. MS in quantitative science field. 5 yr exp dvlp trading algorithms. 1 yr exp programming of C++, Matlab.

To Blue Fire Capital, 311 S Wacker Dr #2000, Chicago IL 60606

RENTALS

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

appls incl. Section 8 ok. 888-2497971

Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. Also Homes for Rent available . 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com

REAL ESTATE

8200 S. DREXEL XL 1BR $665/ mo. Heat & appls incl. LR, DR, newly remodeled. No Sec Dep. Section 8 OK. Call 312-915-0100.

STUDIO OTHER

FALL SPECIAL $500 Toward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR

SEEKS

Sr. Analysts, Analytics for Chicago, IL location to develop predictive risk & business intelligence solutions. Master’s in Statistics/Applied Mathematic s/Management Info. Systems/related Quantitative field + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Statistics/Applied Math ematics/Management Info. Systems/ related Quantitative field + 5yrs exp. req’d. Must have 1yr exp. w/SQL, Python, Hadoop, Hive, Neo4j, Cypher, Unix Command, SAS, R, predictive modeling w/linear & logistic regression, GLM, tree models, GBM, Clustering analysis, Principal component analysis & feature creation, data audit processes, score model development. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: MM, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

STUDIO $600-$699

7520 S. COLES - 1 BR $520, 2 BR $645, Includes appliances & AC, Near transp., No utilities included (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt

232 E 121ST Pl.

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL - $300 Move in Fee - Nice lrg 1BR $575; 2BR $699 & 1 3BR $850, balcony. Sec 8 Welc. 773995-6950

MARQUETTE PARK 7122 S Troy, Beaut. rehabbed 4BR 2BA house, fin bsmt, granite ctrs, SS appls, 2-car gar, $1700/mo 708288-4510 CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 HOMES AND APARTMENTS

for rent. Throughout Chicago & Suburbs. 773-941-4667

8926 S HARPER. Newly updated 1BR garden apt, $685/mo, + all utils, 1st & last mo. rent & $350 sec dep. req’d. Call 773-416-4217 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

CHICAGO 70TH & King Dr, 1BR, 1st flr, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry, Heat incl. Sec. 8 Ok Starting at $720/mo 773-510-9290 û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry. Studio/1BR.

$465-$520. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

1 BR $700-$799 NO APPLICATION FEE Studio. $675 1BR. $750.

Near Metra & shops, Section 8 OK. Newly decorated, dining room, carpeted, appls, FREE heat & cooking gas. Elevator & laundry rm 1-773-919-7102 or 1-312-802-7301 WEST SIDE, DELUXE 1BR Apt, stove/ refrigerator/laundry room, AC. Near Oak Park. $765/mo, utilities included.

Call 708418-2384.

8001 S COLFAX: 1BR $650 New remodel, hdwd floors cable. Off street parking. Section 8 welcome. 708-308-1509 or 773-493-3500.

10209 S. ST. LAWRENCE , 3.5 rooms in basement, $700/mo, utilities included. Call Mr. Kinnie 773-264-8518 2BR, HEAT INCL, no appliances, 111th & Vernon, clean, quiet, secure bldg $700 plus sec.

Mr. Jones. 312-802-9492 ALSIP: BEAUTIFUL, Large 1BR, 1BA overlooks the park. $720-$750 /mo. Appliances, laundry, parking & storage. Call 708-268-3762 1BR, 63RD & PULASKI.

Spacious & Attractive. $700/mo.

Heated Steadman Rlty. 773-284-5822 After 5pm 773-835-9870

9147 S. ASHLAND. Studio $650 & 1BR $740, clean & secure, dine-In Kit, appls, laundry. U Pay gas & elec, No Pets. 312-914-8967.

1 BR $800-$899 2 MONTHS FREE 6600 S. Ingle-

side, 1 & 2 Bedrooms, $850-$1000 Free heat and Laundry Room, Sec 8 OK. Niki 773.647-0573. www.livenovo.com

1 BR $900-$1099 ONE BEDROOM NEAR Warren

Park and Metra. 6800 N. Wolcott.

Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $900925/month. Available 11/1. 773-7614318.

HOMEWOOD- 1BR new kitchen, new appls, oak flrs, ac, lndry/ stor., $925/mo incls ht/prkg, near Metra. 773.743.4141 Urban Equit ies.com LARGE ONE BEDROOM near the Red Line. 6828 N. Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets ok. Heat included.

Laundry in building. $900/month.

Available 11/1. 773-761-4318.

LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT .

6824 N. Wayne. Hardwood floors.

Heat included. Pets OK. Laundry in building. Available 11/1. $710/month 773-761-4318.

EDGEWATER 900SFT 1BR, new kit, sunny FDR, vintage builtins, oak flrs, Red Line, $975/mo heated www.urbanequities.com 773-743-4141

No. Southport DLX 2BR: new kit w/deck, SS appl, oak flrs, cent he at/AC, lndry $1595+ util pkg avail.

773 -743-4141 www. urbanequities.com E Rogers Park: Deluxe 1BR + den, new kitc., FDR, oak flrs close to beach. $1175/heated, 774-743-4141 ww.urbanequities.com E ROGERS PARK: 3BR / 2BA + den, new kitchen, SS appliances, FDR, $1900/heated, 774-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

1 BR $1100 AND OVER Edgewater 1000sf 1BR: new kit, SS appls, quartz ctrs, built-ins, oak flrs, lndry, $1050$1075/heated 773-743-4141 w ww.urbanequities.com Edgewater 2 1/2 rm studio: Full Kit, new appl, dinette, oak flrs, walk-n closets, $850/mo incls ht/ gas. Call 773-743-4141 or visit ww w.urbanequities.com HYDE PARK NEWPORT Condo,

1BR, 1BA, appls incl, tenant pays utils. $1250/mo + 1 mo sec dep.

Sec 8 Welcome. 773-636-2402

1 BR OTHER WAITLIST OPEN Anathoth Gardens/PACE APTS.

1 & 2 Bedroom Apts Available Senior buildings, rent based on 30% Of monthly income. A/C, laundry room, Cable ready, intercom entry system.

Applications Are being accepted between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.

Monday thru Friday at Anathoth Gardens 34 N. Keeler Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60624 Please call 773-826-0214 For more Information

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. Hot Summer Is Here Cool Off In The Pool OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $795.00 2Bdr From $925.00 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 ∫

l

l

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE!!

Most units Include..

HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** MOST BEAUT. APTS! 6748 Crandon, 2BR, $875. 7727 Colfax, 2BR, $875.

6220 Eberhart, 2 & 3BR, $850-$1150.

7527 Essex, 2BR, $950 773-9478572 / 312-613-4424 CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939

ORLAND PARK 2BR condo w/ balcony, 2nd flr, 2BA, all appl., in unit laundry, heat/water incl. No pets. $1100/mo. 708-749-9914 leave message LOOKING TO MOVE ASAP? Remodeled 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Apts.

Heat & Appls incl. Sec 8 OK. Southside Only. 773-593-4357

1BR, 1ST FLR, Newly rehab, hdwd

flrs, spac, appls, lndry facility, Quiet bldg. Gated backyard. Sec 8 ok. 773344-4050

74TH/KING DR &

88th/Dauphin. Beautiful 1BRs. Spac, great trans, laundry on site, security camera. 312-341-1950

1 OR 2BR apt in newer building, completely rehabbed, heat included, 59th & California. Section 8 welcome. Call 773-517-9622 SUBURBS, RENT TO OW N! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com SOUTH SHORE AREA

FREE HEAT 94-3739 S. BISHOP.

2BR, 5rm, 2nd floor, appls, parking, storage & closet space, near shops/ trans. $900 + sec. 708-335-0786

83RD & COMMERCIAL, 2 B R , 1BA, kitchen, LR close to schools & trans, $750/mo + $500 Move In Fee. Ten pays utils. 773-775-4458 1512 E. 77TH ST. Spacious 2BR, hdwd flrs, appls, garage, tenant pays utils, quiet blk. $815 + sec.

Check Check Req. 646-2023294 75TH/EMERALD. No Sec. Dep. Required! Hurry Won’t Last! Water and Heat Incl. 2BR. $750. Income verification req. Mel 773-999-3712 SOUTH SHORE: 76TH & Kenwood, 2 Bed $795 & 1 Bed $695, Heat Included Call 312.208.

1771 BEAUTIFUL,

ALL NEW

2.5 bdrms, 1BA. $850/mo, no sec dep, no application fee, hdwd, new appl, sec 8 ok. 81st & Kingston 773-412-0541

2 & 3BR’s, 1 BA , heat included, prices $800-$995/mo plus 1 mo sec close to transportation,Section 8 Welcome 773-855-9916 2BR plus den, 3rd fl, 45th & King , a/c, hdwd floors, close to

transportation, Section 8 Welcome, No pets$850/mo 773-924-9623

2 BR $900-$1099 CALUMET PARK, 2BR House, all brick, side drive, 1 car garage, C/A, appliances incl., vicinity of 125th & Ada. $950/mo. Call Hardy, 708941-3274 DLX 1ST FLR, 2.5BR, hdwd flrs, ceiling fans, lg LR/DR & ktchen, 3 car gar. 83rd & Maryland. $900, Free heat & appl incl. Sec 8 welc.

773-412-0541

1436 S Trumbull, 2BR $900/ month, no sec deposit. New rem.

Hrdwd flrs, lndy. Sec system in bldg Section 8 Welcome. 708308-1788

6700 S. Constance Studios & 1 Bedrooms Available Call Mike, 773-744- CHICAGO, 5507 W. Congress Pkwy. 2nd flr, 2 lg BR, 5rm Apt. No 3235

APTS & HOMES AVAIL.

70th & California, 2 & 4BR, modern kitchen & bath. $575-$1200/mo.

Section 8 OK. 847-909-1538

108th St., Lovely 4 rm, 1BR, liv rm, din rm, updated kitchen, heated Close to transportation.

Available now 773-264-6711.

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR UNDER $900 69TH / CALIFORNIA 4 1/2 rms, 2BR, appliances, coin laundry, OH, near Holy cross hospital, off street parking, Garden apt. $820 month + 1 1/2 months Sec Dep. O’Brien Family Realty. 773-581-7883 Agent owned CHICAGO 7600 S Essex FALL SPECIAL 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! Also Homes for rent available. Call 773-287-9999 Westside Locations 773-287-4500 CHICAGO, GARFIELD BLVD & Union Area, 2nd flr, spacious 2BR w/ LR & DR, heated, quiet bldng.

Great trans. $750/mo.

312-720-3671.

NEAR 76TH/MARSHFIELD. 2BR Bsmt apt. $690. Heat Incl.

2BR, 1st flr Apt. $860. Heat Incl.

Near trans & shops.

Call 773-349-5534

700 N. RIDGEWAY. 2 & 4BRs,

hdwd flrs, new remod, sec 8 OK. Starting at $700. No Dep for Sec 8.

Accept 1-3BR vouchers.

773-895-9495

2&3 BDRM INCLUDE, stve, refrig,

heat: $850/900 month.1&1/2 month security.$10 application Fee.4421 W. Fulton. 773-851-5219.

pets. $900 + sec. Tenant pays utils. 773-320-3402 / 773-287-1981 GREAT 4 ROOMS, 1 BEDROOM

North Park, new paint, new kitchen, newer windows, laundry facilities, heated, $850/mo. 773-878-6419

2 BR $1100-$1299 66TH & WOODLAWN: large 2BR, stove, refrig., gas, light included. No security deposit. Section 8 ok. $1125/mo. Call 773-6841166.

BUCKTOWN: 1922 N Wilmot,

4Rms, 2BR, 1 Blk from "Blue Line L".

Modern kitchen & bath. Hardwood floors. $1100 + security. Avail. immediately. No Dogs. Call (773)612-3112

ELMHURST: DLX 1BR, new appls & carpet, a/c, balcony, $895$950/mo. incl heat, prkg. OS lndry, 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities. com

CHATHAM, 720 E. 81st St. Newly remodeled 2BR, 1BA, hardwood floors, appliances & heat included.

Call 847-533-5463.

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

CALUMET CITY - 2BR Apt, heat & appliances included, off street parking. No smoking/no pets. Section 8 welcome. Call 630-220-7914

CALUMET CITY - 4BR House, 2BA, $1250/mo + sec dep. Section 8 Welcome, appliances incl, 708-606-9446 or 708-638-0442

RICHTON PARK 3 & 4BR Ranch.

University Park 2BR Townhome.

Matteson 2BR Condo. Sect 8 OK. Call 708-625-7355 for info.

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 CHICAGO, NEWLY DECORATED, 3 bedroom near 81st & South Shore Drive, 2 full baths, heat included. $950/mo + 1 mo sec. 219-314-6620 4BR

HOUSE,

RECENTLY

rehabbed, large bsmt. $1400/mo. + move-in fee, 78th/ Aberdeen, Sec 8 welc. Call 312-860-0972 or 815-8060881

CHICAGO, THIS IS IT! 3BR. 7820 S. Constance.

Starting at $995. Heat included. Section 8 ok. Call Pete, 312.770.

0589 XL 2ND FL., 78TH & S. Sangamon St., 3BR, 1BA, $1000/ mo + sec. Heat incl. No pets, credit ck 773-874-0524, 9am-10pm 54TH & S. RACINE , 3BR 1.5BA, bsmt, large fenced yd good transportation. $1100 plus sec.

Section 8 ok. Call 708-922-9069 SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo.

708-288-4510 SOUTHSIDE 68th/Hermitage, 3BR. $850. 2BR. $750.

70th/Normal, 3BR. $850.

847-977-3552

Calumet City - Clean 3BR, 1.5BA, C/A, balcony, 1.5 blks from shopping & expressway, $1100/mo + 1 mo sec. No pets. 773-314-7116 RIVERDALE , 3BR Newly decorated. Carpet, near metra, no pets, $925/mo + security deposit. Available Now 708-829-1454 7410 S EVANS , 2 BR, 1st fl Newly remodeled, must see!

New everything! $850 plus 1 mo sec deposit 708-474-6520

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 5921 WEST OHIO, 60644, 3BR,1BA, all hdwd floors, new bathroom, separate heat. $1200/month.

708-439-2816 SECTION 8 WELCOME Lrg 3BR/2BA, 2 Story Home. Tenant pays heat & elec. $1300/mo + 1 mo sec. 68th/King Dr. Other loc coming soon! 312-945-6685

8316 S. PEORIA

Attn Sec 8 tenants, newly remod 3BR, 1.5ba, hdwd flrs, W/D hookup, low sec dep. $1350. 708-275-1751

7258 S. COLES. Spacious apt, 3BR, off street parking, sec 8 welcome. $1200/mo + sec.

773-715-9483

ADULT SERVICES

CONDO APPEAL 3BR/2BA

Humboldt Park garden unit. Great location - 2 blocks west of park and convenient to everything. Recently renovated. Be the first to live in this unit since renovation. Fenced backyard. 1300 per month. Section 8 ok.

Call (773) 972-3811

CHICAGO, 11728 S. Harvard, Well maintained 3BR, 1BA, bsmt, fenced in bkyrd, 2 car garage avail. $1225/mo. 630-240-1684 NEWLY DECORATED 3BR

Home, 2BA, fin bsmt, near 127th and Yale. $1500/mo.Tenant pays utils.

Section 8 OK. 773-928-3922

3

BEDROOM

TOWNHOME,

Great Neighborhood. Tier 1 School, Section 8 ok. Call 312-501-0509

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 Bronzeville DLX 1/BR: new kit, private deck & yard, SS appls, FDR, oak flrs, new windows, $950/ heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities .com SPACIOUS 3BR, 1BA APT, formal dining, heat and kitchen, near 83rd and Loomis. $1200.

Sec 8 OK. Call B. 312-498-9744 Evanston DLX 1B+Den, vintage beauty, new appl, oak flrs, French doors Laundry $1095/heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities.com

EVANSTON 2BR, 1100SQFT, New Kit/ oak flrs, new windows, OS Lndry, $1295/incl heat, 773743-4141 urbanequities.com

CHICAGO,11526 S. HARVARD. Newly remodeled, 5BR, 2BA, $1600/mo. Tenants pay utilities.

Call 773-793-8339, ask for Joe. IRVING PARK & CALIFORNIA,

Large 3 Bedroom, newly renovated, wood floors. Close to Brown Line, schools, good transportation. Available immediately. 773-588-0359

ROBBINS - 3BR HOUSE, Crestwood Schools. Hdwd flrs,

private fenced bckyrd w/shed, front parking, $1250/mo. Sect 8 Welc 773-895-9495

CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent.

Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail.

Call 708-752-3812 for Westside locations 773-287-4500

BEAUTIFULLY RENOVATED 3BR Single Family Homes, new kit. Fridge, stove & W/D incl. Hdwd flrs. Cash & Sect 8 Welc. 708-557-0644 HUMBOLDT PARK - Huge im-

maculate 3BR, 1BA luxury unit close to trans & shops. Newly remodeled !

Won’t last long, must see, Sec 8 Welcome. Nigel 312-519-9771

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

CHICAGO 10801 S. Hoxie , 2nd

floor 6BR, 2BA. Hdwd floors, Sec 8 ok., 4 or 3BR voucher ok. Call 847312-5643

ADULT SERVICES

16 E. 122nd Place, 4BR House, LR, DR, full bsmt, fenced backyard.

Close to schools, CTA & metra.

non-residential

SOUTHSIDE NEWLY REMOD,

units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue.

773-685-6868.

South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

Sec 8 ok. $1250 + sec. 773-610-1332

5BR, 2BA, finished bsmt, huge fenced-in back yard, SS Appls & W/ D. 773-908-8791

SOUTHSIDE, NEWLY REMOD

3BR/2BA, living room, dining room, black appliances & washer/dryer in apt. 773-908-8791

Markham, 3 & 4 BR homes for rent, Section 8 welcome Security Required 708-262-6506

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

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

773-221-7490, 773-221-7493 101ST/MAY, 1 & 2br. 77th/Lowe.

1 & 2br. 69th/Dante 3br. 71st/ Bennett. 2br. 77th/Essex. 3br. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366

FOR SALE

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

roommates CHICAGO FURNISHED ROOM FOR RENT, 52nd/ Marshfield, 78th & May. $100 - $125/week.

All utilities included. 773-6167673 SOUTH SHORE, Senior Discount. Male preferred.

Furnished rooms, shared kitchen & bath, $545/mo. & up. Utilities included. 773-710-5431 1 WEEK FREE. 96th & Halsted & other locations. Large Rooms, shared kitchen & bath. $100/week and up. Call 773-673-2045 CHICAGO, SOUTH SIDE, $300 Move in Special! Utilities, bed & TV included. Security Deposit Required. Call 773-563-6799 CHICAGO 67th & Emerald - furn. rooms, 45 + male pref, share kitchen & bath, utils incl, cable ready.

From $350. 773-358-2570.

FRENCH BULLDOG PUPS,10 WKS,$700,HEALTHY,AKC,EM AIL scotting88@aol.com 773-5350633

KILL TEED!

ROACHES-GUARAN-

Buy Harris Roach Tablets.

Odorless, Long Lasting Available: Hardware Stores, The Home Depot, homedepot.com LYNWOOD: MOVING SALE , 42 GLARUS LN, 10am-4pm Everyday. Everything must go!

Family, Living, Dining & Bedroom Furniture, Accessories, Appliances, Etc.

BEACH PROPERTY - BAJA MEXICO, Rosarito, just south of San Diego is our warm relaxed Pacific beach community. RE/ MAX Realty, Jamie Suarez, 619748-8322, bajainvestment.com or suarezjamie10@gmail.com

CHICAGO, SINGLE ROOM IN 4BR home, 6541 S. Hermitage, large living & dining room, full basement. Call 708-333-9490

HEALTH & WELLNESS

ROOM & MEALS, SSI welcome

70 E 102ND St.,-Open House Sat

$450/mo. Near 81st/Halsted. 773449-8716

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

11-1. 3BR/3BA brick bungalow, granite ctrs, SS appls, fin. bsmt., mortgage pymt $1050, no money down.

Text Linda 708-513-7057.

AUSTIN AREA FSBO, 5BR, 2.5 BA, new roof, new garage, parking for 3 cars, new furnace & hot water tank, $125,000 negotiable.

773-593-2030 RIVERDALE 6 units $80,000 "As Is" Four 2BRs, & Two 1BRS. 138th at METRA. Ranch Realty. 773-952-2122

ADULT SERVICES

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

ADULT SERVICES

special. Russian, Polish, Ukrainain girls. Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

MESSAGES SPIRITUAL PSYCHIC READER Tells you past, present , future,

helps w/all problems, She does not ask why you call she will tell you.

FREE consultation 630-408-4789

ADULT SERVICES

Wrigleyville DLX 3BR, new kit, private deck & yard, FDR, oak floors, sunroom, $1950/heated 773-7434141 urbanequities.com 3BR, 4100N: Sunny New Kit, SS appl, deck, close to beach/ Cubs park, Ldr y/storage, $1995/heated 773-7434141 urbanequities.com

ALB Pk DLX 3BR + den, new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, on-site lndy, $1495/+ util. 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 LARGE 3 BEDROOM apartment near Wrigley Field. 3820 N. Fremont.

Two bathrooms. Hardwood Floors.

Cats OK. $2175/month. Special!

Sign a lease starting by November 1, and get a free tandem parking space for one year. Available 11/1. 773-7614318.

ADULT SERVICES

2 BR $1300-$1499 2BR 1BA CONDO, Clearwater FL

3 month min., swimming pool, club house, 5 min drive to beach. no pets, $1300. 708-485-7227, 773-458-8995.

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME $250 Move-In Bonus, No Dep. 225 W 108th Pl, 2BR/1BA . 7134 S. Normal, 4BR/2BA. ceiling fans Ht, ht water & appls incl 312-683-5174

68th & Peoria, 2BR, lge kitchen, ceiling fans, hdwd flrs, jacuzzi style bath, finished bsmt, patio, encl porch, lighted sec 773-470-6714

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

224-223-7787

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44 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

STRAIGHT DOPE SLUG SIGNORINO

Never miss a show again.

By Cecil Adams q : With most aspects of food (e.g., styles of

cooking, pans, dishes), you could fill a book with all the ways different cultures have come up with to do the same basic task. Not so with cutlery.

For all the different worldwide cuisines, your choice is chopsticks or “Western” cutlery—knife, fork, spoon. What other options are there? Are these really the only two types of cutlery that mankind has invented? —GRIFFIN1977, VIA THE STRAIGHT DOPE MESSAGE BOARD

A : Hey, don’t forget the little sugar stick that comes in a packet of Fun Dip—surely the greatest Western contribution to the cause of silverware since the knife-spoon-fork trifecta.

It runs a distant fourth, true, but consider that the Fun Dip stick is both functional and edible. If you’re looking at this matter strictly in terms of “cutlery,” Griffin—i.e., nonperishable utensils—you’re selling humankind short.

Plenty of cultures eat the delivery device along with the food.

Look at the question this way, and you realize we’ve actually come up with a great diversity of eating utensils, varying widely depending on where you are. On the Horn of Africa, it’s injera, a naturally leavened flatbread made from teff flour; in Mexico and its environs it’s the tortilla, the end result of what’s called nixtamalization, a process developed by the Mesoamericans that frees up nutrients in corn and makes it easier to grind. On the Indian subcontinent you’ve got naan; in the Middle East, pita. We note that in many places where there’s little distance between the food and the fingers, other cultural practices have, of necessity, coevolved: namely, the convention that the right hand is for eating and the left hand is for . . . other business. (As the prophet Muhammad put it, “The devil eats and drinks with his left hand.”)

If we think of how these edible delivery devices function—they can be used to pinch food, but also to scoop it—it’s no huge leap to connect them with the spoon: they’re fulfilling the same basic function, and indeed spoons have been around in some form or other since prehistoric times. Likewise, the knife is a descendant of the hand ax, one of the oldest human tools, which originated in Africa; using a sharpened object to hack and stab a live animal isn’t too different from using it on a cooked one. It’s the fork that’s the real interloper in terms of eating utensils, and you may be surprised to learn that it’s of relatively recent vintage.

(We’ll leave aside chopsticks—a story for another day—as well as a host of other, lesser utensils, like skewers.)

“The shape of the fork has been around a lot longer than the eating utensil,” a recent

fork-history piece in Slate reminds us. This may account for some of the suspicion forks encountered when they turned up at the Byzantine dinner table circa the 11th century: spearlike implements with multiple prongs had previously been associated with the Greek god Poseidon and, well, the devil. The ascetic Benedictine monk Saint Peter Damian was a notably vigorous detractor: witnessing a Venetian princess using a two-tined protofork to bring food to her mouth, Peter condemned with horror “the luxury of her habits”—i.e., that “she deigned not to touch her food with her fingers.” When the princess died of the plague, Peter blamed her dinner-table vanity.

Forks spread through Europe from the Byzantine Empire, but retained their effete associations: a 1605 allegorical novel written about the reign of Henry III depicted a strange colony of hermaphrodites who, pointedly, ate with forks; a hundred years or so later, Louis XIV still wouldn’t let his kids use them. Ultimately, though, it was the French (you know— fussy, decadent, food obsessed) who cemented the fork’s role in the Western place setting, and it’s been here ever since. As its use trickled down from the nobles to the hoi polloi, the elite devised ways for forks to retain their rarefied status: think of the salad fork, the dessert fork, the whole elaborate continental dinner service.

But for how much longer? Avant-type restaurants in the U.S. have been leading the charge in eschewing the old ways and embracing edible mediums. “You sit down at the table and you say, ‘Why do I need to eat with silverware?’ And the answer is, ‘Really, you don’t,’” Grant Achatz, maybe the nation’s most famous modernist chef, said a little while back. “It’s almost hypocritical to create a plate of food in 2013 on barbaric old serviceware that’s more than 300 years old.” We’re always at the whims of the elite, of course, but if what they’re trying to push on us next is utensils you can eat, I can’t say I mind. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

‘What is the appropriate amount of side boob?’

Dan Savage answers burning questions from a live audience in San Francisco.

I had a blast hosting Savage Lovecast Live at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. Audience members submitted questions before the show, and I consumed a large pot edible right after the curtain went up and then raced to give as much decent sex advice as I could before it took effect (I think). Here are some of the questions I didn’t get to.

Q : My best friend is in a

relationship with a really jealous, controlling guy. He guilt-trips her constantly and gets passive-aggressively mad whenever she tries to hang out with people besides him. When she complains about him, I want to say fuck him, he’s a dick, except . . . she’s having a fullon affair with another guy and seems not to feel bad about it! I don’t know what advice to give or how to make sense of the situation.

What’s my responsibility to her? To her boyfriend?

A : Maybe your best friend’s

boyfriend is jealous and controlling because he senses—or because he knows—his girlfriend is cheating on him. Or maybe it didn’t occur to your best friend to cheat on her boyfriend until after he accused her of cheating for the millionth time. Or maybe they’re both terrible people who deserve each other and neither is your responsibility.

20s/30s. We’re curious about straight PDA in gay bars. She feels it should be kept to a minimum, but a little is OK. He feels it shouldn’t happen, as it may make people uncomfortable. Thoughts?

A : I think this is something

you and your oppositesex partner should discuss over drinks in one of the thousands of straight bars in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Q : I feel like all my friends

resent me for getting married. How do I make them feel less insecure about my new relationship?

A : Ask yourself which is

likelier: All of your friends are so petty and insecure that they resent you for getting married, or you were a megalomaniacal bride- or groom- or nonbinary-zilla and behaved so atrociously that you managed to piss off all your friends? If it’s the (less likely) former, make better friends. If it’s the (more likely) latter, make amends.

Q : My brother’s fiancee told

my mom that she doesn’t like my mom’s usual lipstick color and asked my mom to wear a shade she picked out for the wedding. My mom is 75 and wears cute pink lipstick. Is it wrong if both my mom and I wear the pink in solidarity?

A : You should absolutely

amount of side boob?

wear your mom’s shade in solidarity—and send me a pic of you two at the wedding, please!

A : This is outside my area of

Q : Since my man and I

Q : What is the appropriate

expertise/giving a shit. So I’m going to pass this question on to Tim Gunn. I’ll let you know what Tim has to say should he respond.

Q : My partner and I are a straight couple in our

got engaged, we’ve been fighting about wedding planning. We never fought until now. How can we move forward with the wedding without ruining our relationship? Best sex of my life, BTW.

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

A : Elope. For your own

sake, for the sake of friends and family members who will inevitably be sucked into your conflict about your wedding plans, for the sake of all that excellent sex . . . just fucking elope.

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A : Nope!

Q : You’ve recommended

marijuana to help women have better sex. I’ve tried it, but I often get so high that time seems to fracture.

When that happens, I worry I’m missing orgasms. What should I do?

A : Less!

Q : When is the best time to

tell my married, ostensibly straight coworker that I want to have sexy gay times with his bubble butt?

A : Hmm . . . maybe once

you’ve updated your resumé, seeing as your gay trouble butt may get fired after you grab his straight bubble butt?

Q : What are some ways to

overcome shyness and tell your partner what you want?

A : Think how soon you’ll be

dead (soon!) and how long you’re gonna stay dead once you’re dead (forever!). Then tell your partner everything.

Do it in an e-mail if you can’t do it face-to-face—but do it!

Donald Trump is president and we could all be dead tomorrow. Don’t delay! v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. v @fakedansavage

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

Robert Plant ò MADS PERCH

NEW

Alex Aiono 1/14, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Black Veil Brides, Asking Alexandria 1/20, 6:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Bodeans 12/31, 7:30 and 11 PM; 1/1, 5 and 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/28, noon b Marc Broussard 12/21, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Thu 9/28, 10 AM b Jake Bugg 11/30, 8:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM, 18+ Celebrating David Bowie with Mike Garson, Adrian Belew, Gerry Leonard, and more 2/23, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM, 18+ Cubanate 11/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ DakhaBrakha 11/24, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 9/29, 8 AM b The Darkness 4/11, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM, 18+ Howie Day 11/30, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Thu 9/28, 10 AM b Dead Horses 12/15, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Do Make Say Think 12/8, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM, 18+ Alan Doyle 3/2, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/28, noon b Foster the People, Cold War Kids 12/1, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds 2/24, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM

Ghostemane 11/15, 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Hush Sound 12/22, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Impaler 10/28, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Joywave 11/21, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM, 18+ Dave Koz 12/9, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM Larkin Poe 11/18, 9 PM, Martyrs’ Jon McLaughlin 12/22, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Chrisette Michele 12/28, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM, 17+ Rhett Miller, Matthew Ryan 11/30, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/28, noon b Joey Molland 11/20, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/28, noon b Morrissey 11/25, 8:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Mozzy 11/11, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM, 18+ Robert Plant & the Sensational Space Shifters 2/20, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 9/29, 11 AM, 18+ Queens of the Stone Age, Run the Jewels 12/2, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Real Friends, Knuckle Puck 12/29, 6 PM, Metro b Rise Against, Papa Roach, Night Riots 11/30, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b Sales 10/21, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Scale the Summit 12/3, 6 PM, Wire, Berwyn b Slander 12/2, 11 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+

46 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Stars & Strings with Brad Paisley, Chris Young, Darius Rucker, Kelsea Ballerini, Lady Antebellum, and more 11/15, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM Avery Sunshine 12/21, 7 and 9:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/28, noon b Tokio Hotel 2/16, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Travelin’ McCourys 11/19, 7 PM, Park West, 18+ Twista 11/25, 9 PM, Wire, Berwyn Wax Fang 12/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Wifisfuneral 11/19, 7 PM, Subterranean b Wookiefoot 11/17-18, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Yung Lean & Sad Boys 1/31, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 9/29, 10 AM b

UPDATED Kooks 5/30, 8 PM, the Vic, rescheduled from 10/11, 18+ Dua Lipa 11/26, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, moved from House of Blues Bob Mould, Helen Money 12/29, 8 PM; 12/30, 8 PM; and 12/31, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston, 12/29 and 12/30 are sold out b Timeflies 10/22, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, canceled

UPCOMING Algiers 10/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Tori Amos 10/27, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Animals as Leaders, Periphery 11/1, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Beach Fossils, Snail Mail 10/17, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

b Beach Slang, Dave Hause & the Mermaid 11/25, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Bully 11/7, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Cannibal Corpse, Power Trip, Gatecreeper 11/24, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Cattle Decapitation, Revocation 10/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Coin 2/7, 8 PM, House of Blues b Dear Hunter, Family Crest 12/8, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Death From Above 11/4, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Descendents, Get Up Kids 10/7, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b The Drums, Methyl Ethel 11/9, 7 PM, Metro b Elder, King Buffalo 10/17, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ EMA 11/18, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Flamin’ Groovies 10/19, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Eleanor Friedberger 11/18, 9 PM, Hideout Liam Gallagher 11/21, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Goblin 10/25, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Guns N’ Roses 11/6, 8 PM, United Center Hatebreed 12/3, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Peter Hook & the Light 5/4, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Imagine Dragons, Grouplove 10/18, 7:30 PM, United Center Insane Clown Posse 10/29, 6:30 PM, Portage Theater b Jukebox the Ghost 10/29, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Kesha 10/18, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Kid Cudi 11/4-5, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Krewella 11/10, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b L.A. Witch 11/12, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Lemon Twigs 10/26, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti 10/20, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Lorde 3/27, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Jessica Lea Mayfield 11/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle JD McPherson 11/16, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Mewithoutyou, Pianos Become the Teeth 10/7, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Microwave 11/1, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Milky Chance 1/26, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Murder by Death 12/31, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Nothing but Thieves 10/25, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ NRBQ 10/27, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Angel Olsen 12/9, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

F

Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Origin 10/22, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Pears 10/11, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Pixies, Mitski 10/8, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Poi Dog Pondering 12/26-30, City Winery b Protomartyr 10/8, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Quinn XCII 10/6, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Red Red Meat 11/22, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Frankie Rose 10/7, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Slaughter Beach 11/7, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Sweet Spirit 10/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Terror 10/8, 7:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ UFO, Saxon 10/8, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ The Weeknd 11/2, 7:30 PM, United Center Zola Jesus, John Wiese 10/8, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

SOLD OUT Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile 10/26, 7:30 PM, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 10/27, 8:30 PM; Thalia Hall, 10/28, 9 PM; and Empty Bottle Bleachers, Bishop Briggs 11/11, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Daniel Caesar 11/20, 9 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Greta Van Fleet 11/30, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Gryffin, Autograf 10/13, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Iron & Wine 10/12-13, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Jessie J 10/25, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Knuckle Puck 10/6, 6:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Lil Peep 10/19, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Mura Masa, Tennyson 11/16, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ The National 12/12-13, 7:30 PM, Lyric Opera House b Noname 11/21, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Rich Chigga 11/11, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b T-Pain 10/15, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Avey Tare 10/6, 10 PM, Hideout Grace Vanderwaal 11/15, 7 PM, Park West b Whitney, Ne-Hi 11/2, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Young Thug 11/1, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene GOSSIP WOLF GOT the retail-therapy blues when Permanent Records closed their Ukrainian Village store this summer, but the space already has a new lease on life! Chicago record-collecting couple Jesa Espinoza and Rosemary Villaseñor will open Joyride Records in the former Permanent storefront at noon on Saturday, September 30, throwing a free party with DJs at 2 PM (including Dave McCune, Hunter Husar, and Sr. Marlowe of Sonorama), bands to be announced, and complimentary beer from Half Acre.

Espinoza says Joyride will stock “hard-tofind gems, more music from South America, and lots and lots of local records.” Welcome to the neighborhood, folks!

Gossip Wolf is sad to report that local rock label Tall Pat Records is packing it in.

The tall Pat in question, Pat Sullivan (also an occasional Reader contributor), says his final release will be a live recording of this year’s Cuddlestock fest, which the label hosts at Cole’s on November 3 and at the Empty Bottle on November 4. “I’ve accomplished everything I wanted to do, save a hit record, but I’m just tired—it’s a lot of work,” Sullivan says. “It felt like it was a good time to walk away.” (The Cuddlestock poster includes the line “Wow, that was an expensive hobby!”) Tall Pat is also partying with Goose Island, Empty Bottle Presents, and Big Star Records (the restaurant’s new music endeavor) for Comfort Station’s annual summer fund-raiser on Saturday, September 30; acts include Nobunny, Quarter Mile Thunder, Ryley Walker, and Negative Scanner.

This wolf usually recommends local acts, but did you know that 80s superstar Billy Ocean—singer of “Caribbean Queen” and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car”— is playing Joe’s Live, a nightclub 3,000 feet from O’Hare, on Sunday, October 1?

It’s Billy Fucking Ocean, people! Squad up!

Opening are DJ Kenny “Jammin” Jason (of the original WMBX Hot Mix 5) and yacht-rock cover crew the Ron Burgundy’s.

—J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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THE MOTET / DOPAPOD – Friday, Nov. 10 • GRACE VANDERWAAL– Nov. 15 - Sold Out! • RUGGEDLY JEWISH-BOB GARFIELD– Dec. 9 - On Sale 9/16 • TODD RUNDGREN – Dec. 16 & 17

®

SPECIAL GUEST:

“DELICATE” STEVE MARION

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6

THIS FRIDAY! SEPTEMBER 29

THE CHURCH SPECIAL GUEST:

THE HELIO SEQUENCE

SPECIAL GUEST:

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6

SAMMY BRUE

OCTOBER 10

THE RETURN OF

BRIDGET EVERETT

OCTOBER 18

OCT. 20 SHOW IS SOLD OUT!

THURSDAY OCTOBER 19

VALERIE

JUNE

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

APRIL 11, 2018 RON POPE – Saturday, Oct. 21 • SHAWN COLVIN – Saturday, Oct. 28 • JOHNNY CLEGG – Oct. 29 • LUNA – Nov. 2 THE MOTET / DOPAPOD – Friday, Nov. 10 • GRACE VANDERWAAL – Nov. 15 - Sold Out! TRAVELIN’ MCCOURYS-CHICAGO JAM – Nov. 19 • RUGGEDLY JEWISH-BOB GARFIELD – Dec. 9 TODD RUNDGREN – Dec. 16 & 17 • JON MCLAUGHLIN – Friday, Dec. 22

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 15

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY - 10AM!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY - 10AM!

THE FAB FAUX – Saturday, Oct. 7 • DARK STAR ORCHESTRA – Friday, Oct. 13 • CAMERON ESPOSITO & RHEA BUTCHER – Saturday, Oct. 14 • WHITNEY CUMMINGS – Oct. 19 GAVIN DEGRAW – Oct. 22 • HAMILTON LEITHAUSER – Friday, Oct. 27 • VIOLENT FEMMES – Saturday, Oct. 28 • ANIMALS AS LEADERS/PERIPHERY – Nov. 1 JAPANDROIDS – Nov. 2 • DEATH FROM ABOVE – Saturday, Nov. 4 • SLOWDIVE – Nov. 5 • ELBOW – Nov. 8 • JOSH RITTER & THE ROYAL CITY BAND – Nov. 9 • JOHNNYSWIM – Friday, Nov. 10 TURNPIKE TROUBADOURS – Saturday, Nov. 11 • HOODIE ALLEN – Nov. 16 • JOHN MCLAUGHLIN/JIMMY HERRING – Nov. 17-18 • SQUEEZE – Saturday, Nov. 25 • ILIZA SHLESINGER – Friday, Dec. 1 DAMIEN ESCOBAR – Saturday, Dec 2 • RHETT & LINK – Saturday, Dec. 9 • BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB – Saturday, Feb. 10 • HIPPO CAMPUS – Friday, Feb. 16 OMD – Friday, Mar. 16 • DIXIE DREGS –Saturday, Mar. 24 • STEVEN WILSON – May 1 & 2 • THE KOOKS –May 30-Tickets purchased for 10/11 honored

BUY TICKETS AT SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 47

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