The Chicago International Film Fest 40
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 | O C T O B E R 1 3 , 2 0 1 6
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The Food Issue: staff meals
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THIS WEEK
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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, DERRICK CLIFTON, MATT DE LA PEÑA, MAYA DUKMASOVA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS ISABEL OCHOA GOLD, JACK LADD ---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI HOLTZMANN VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD
THE FOOD ISSUE
A behind-thescenes look at the private off-menu meals of Chicago’s top restaurants
THE FOOD A RESTAURANT serves its employees during a shift is usually called “family meal.” (In industry parlance, the article is a lways con spicuously absent; the typically casual, buffet-style spread isn’t “a family meal” or “the family meal”—it’s just “family meal.”) The phrase conjures the image of the restaurant staff as one big clan—from the marquee chef to the lowly dishwasher, the seasoned front-of-house manager on down to the humble cub busboy—all breaking bread together before they man their respective
stations for the breakneck pace of dinner service. That’s the easy, Rockwellian image of family meal. But as we discovered when we began peering into the kitchens of some of Chicago’s best restaurants before the doors opened to the public, the reality isn’t quite so quaint. Instead of gathering around a single table, restaurant staff more often break into smaller groups, with divisions routinely forming along rank or position, as with BOKA (page 29), where white-coated cooks sat at one table, black-vested servers at
another. Sometimes there simply isn’t a table; at ELIZABETH RESTAURANT (page 31), staff members stand or lean while quickly shoveling calories into their mouths. And while the family meals at spots genuinely run by families like BIRRIERIA ZARAGOZA (page 20) and PARACHUTE (page 24) are communal and convivial, the staff meal at ALINEA (page 14) is struck through with an air of chilly military discipline that’s characteristic of the kitchen. We also found that there’s a notable gap between some restaurants’ public menus and those of
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40 Movies An essential guide to the Chicago International Film Festival
ARTS & CULTURE
MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE
their employee-only feasts, often a quite deliberate one: PUB ROYALE (page 33), for example, eschewed its lauded Indian cuisine in favor of pizza and snickerdoodles just as Alinea abandoned all preciousness to embrace hearty, uncomplicated subcontinental fare. Despite their differences, each staff meal offered an equally alluring opportunity to get a peek at, if not a taste of, the food professional cooks serve to other cooks—even if, as in the case of BELLYQ (page 17), dinner meant an ignoble bowl of Froot Loops. —JAKE MALOOLEY
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ON THE COVER: PHOTO OF BELLYQ’S STAFF MEAL BY NICK MURWAY. FOR MORE OF HIS WORK, GO TO NICKMURWAY.COM.
IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda Baudelaire in a Box Episode 9: Unquenched, “Art21: Chris Ware, Gary Panter, and Hillary Chute,” the film The Accountant, and more recommendations
CITY LIFE
7 Sure Things One great thing to do every day of the week 8 Space For a midcentury modern furniture collector, suburban Homewood is where his heart is. 10 Politics | Joravsky CPS dodged another teachers’ strike. That doesn’t mean the system is fixed. 11 Transportation Toronto offers lessons for Chicago cycling.
35 Small Screen The subjects of Making a Murderer fight for their freedom, now with a bigger fan base. 36 Theater A Red Orchid revives Harold Pinter’s obscure first play. 37 Dance The Joffrey’s Romeo and Juliet carry their romance offstage. 38 Comedy GayCo. celebrates 20 years of LGBTQ revues. 39 Visual Art Moholy-Nagy isn’t the only major modernist in town right now.
45 Shows of note Rae Sremmurd, Rites of Thy Degringolade, Caetano Veloso, and more 48 The Secret History of Chicago Music Early local hardcore band Savage Beliefs began with a $35 Casio keyboard.
FOOD & DRINK
55 Restaurant review: Smyth The fine-dining sibling to the Loyalist is worth a splurge.
CLASSIFIEDS
57 Jobs 58 Apartments & Spaces 60 Marketplace 60 Straight Dope Are there really clowns abducting people in North Carolina? 61 Savage Love Could this 64-yearold man be Dan’s biggest jerk ever? 62 Early Warnings Cloud Nothings, Cut Copy DJ the Mid, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, and more 62 Gossip Wolf Chicago label Deep Space Objects compiles a constellation of diverse electronic tracks, and more music news.
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READER RECOMMENDED
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F explores themes of personal conscience and public morality, and director Erica Weiss’s production effectively uses multimedia to reinforce the ensemble’s fine performances. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 10/22: Sat 3 and 7:30 PM (except 10/15, 3 PM only); also Fri 10/14, 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf. org, $20.
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THEATER
More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Apartment 3A Talk about your sweet nothings! Written by Jeff Daniels (best known lately for his turn as TV news anchor Will McAvoy on HBO’s The Newsroom), this romantic comedy wouldn’t amount to much even if director Ron OJ Parson could make it work. As things stand, though, it’s a silly absence with a spooky twist, about a woman named Annie who’s been rubbed raw by a bad breakup and a frustrating job as director of fund-raising for a public-television channel. Of course, love is standing right in front of her in the form of coworker Elliot—but the question of whether she’ll see it is secondary here. The real mystery is why Elliot doesn’t give up after the millionth indication that she’s not just wrong for him but downright nasty. Parson doesn’t seem to believe in the situation anymore than I do, since he gives up on any semblance of verisimilitude: one scene finds the couple shouting across a restaurant in a way that nobody ever shouts across restaurants. It’s a waste inasmuch as Eleni Pappageorge (Annie) and José “Tony” Garcia (Elliot) can definitely do charm. —TONY ADLER Through 12/18: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W. Irving Park, 312-374-3196, windycityplayhouse.com, $25-$55. Bare: A Pop Opera If Christian rock had a secular cousin, it might sound something like Jon Hartmere Jr. and Damon Intrabartolo’s 2000 musical about two queer young men and their peers coming of age at a Catholic boarding school. Refuge Theatre Project revives the original version (a second began circulating in 2012) in Edgewater’s Epworth United Methodist church sanctuary, an act of site specificity that offers an uncomplicated thematic backdrop at the expense of audio and microphone/ speaker inconsistencies. There’s no question that Matt Dominguez’s expansive young cast is vocally adept; whether or not everyone is well suited to the angsty, raw-sounding, musical-theater
pop-rock score of the era is more iffy. As Sister Chantelle, A. Nikki Greenlee is a highlight who offers doses of adrenaline throughout. —DAN JAKES Through 11/6: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 6 PM, Epworth United Methodist Church, 5253 N. Kenmore, refugetheatre.com, $25. Baudelaire in a Box Episode 9: R Unquenched Dave Buchen, Chris Schoen, and several of their talented
friends have been at it for years now, translating Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal into English, poem by poem; setting each translation to music; and performing the results alongside Buchen’s drawings, which appear on a hand-cranked scroll, cantastoria style. This 80-minute installment, comprising 14 illustrated songs, is the penultimate episode (the tenth comes in the spring) before Theater Oobleck stages Baudelaire in a Box in its entirety in August. Between the black-and-white pictures and the musical influences ranging from country to klezmer, the overall tone here is moody; even Mickle Maher’s slangy, comic treatment of “L’Avertisseur” (about the nasty yellow snake living in every man’s heart) can’t quite shake off the darkness. But it’s a lovely, sweet-minded kind of darkness, well expressed by the onstage septet. The only significant problem is the same one Buchen and Schoen have had all along: as presented, the images and songs exist in separate universes, failing to integrate into a single theatrical statement. —TONY ADLER Through 10/16: Wed-Sat 7 PM, Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 773-281-0824, linkshall.org, $15.
Dying City Anybody who appreciates technical refinement onstage will want to catch this Comrades’ production, now in the middle of a four-week run at the Heartland Studio Theatre. Set during the Iraq War, Christopher Shinn’s drama had its initial run in 2006, when the first round of exit dates from the conflict had come and gone and people had started to wonder whether U.S. forces would ever be able to extricate themselves. Mickey O’Sullivan, last seen in Strawdog Theatre’s DOA, has powerful gifts as an actor, and they’re on display here as he plays identical twins, one of whom, Craig, has died in Baghdad, leaving his Harvard PhD thesis on Faulkner half finished and his brother, Peter, a gay actor, self-destructively struggling through his grief. Craig’s widow, Kelly, brilliantly portrayed by Laura Matthews, is a therapist who confused Craig and now confuses Peter with her icy imperviousness in the face of conflict, whether global or domestic. When anger comes rippling out of her at the end, it’s as chilling as it is cathartic. Elizabeth Lovelady directed. —MAX MALLER Through 10/30: Thu-Sun 7:30 PM, Heartland Studio Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood, 773-791-2393, the-comrades. com, $15. Just Numbers The issues brought up by this ensemble of poet-actors from Chicago Slam Works are painfully familiar to anyone who cares about education in America: snake-oil “reforms,” charlatan charter schools, and, above all, the cult of the standardized test. But the hybrid nature of the show—part poetry slam, part group-written play—brings out the worst in both genres. The story, about eight students who run afoul of school authorities when they rebel against the ACT, is predictable and underwritten. The poems are stan-
dard-issue slam screeds that too often substitute self-righteous rage for revelation. That these performers create as much drama as they do on a mostly bare stage makes me wish they had written stronger material for themselves. —JACK HELBIG Through 11/11: Fri 8:15 PM, Sat 2 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-3275252, chicagoslamworks.com, $10-$25. A Life Extra Ordinary Melissa Ross’s new drama, in which Annabel, a recently murdered young woman, escorts an audience through high and low points in her truncated small-town life, is pregnant with possibility. For much of act one, it’s both a singularly melancholy crime procedural and a millennial Our Town. Act two ruminates on the mundane yet consequential choices we make in the name of love. But dramatically, the play is a nonstarter; the murder mystery lacks intrigue, and the veneration of ordinary life is too pat by half. Still, director John Gawlik’s contemplative production has warmth and sincerity to spare. While a couple of performances feel oversize for the Gift Theatre’s intimate space, as Annabel, Cyd Blakewell shows yet again how much resonance understatement can contain. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 11/20: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Gift Theatre Company, 4802 N. Milwaukee, 773-283-7071, thegifttheatre.org, $35, $25 seniors. Red Velvet It shouldn’t surprise anyone that black American actor Ira Aldridge’s unprecedented appearance as Othello on a London stage in 1833 caused some discomfort, consternation, and even outrage in the white theatrical establishment. Yet British playwright Lolita Chakrabarti spends nearly the entire first act of her 2012 play demonstrating the obvious, often repetitively. Moreover, both Aldridge and his castmates seem bewildered by critics’ virulently racist attacks in act two—as if they can’t fathom such responses in an empire that hasn’t fully abolished slavery. Despite glancing references to contemporary issues like nontraditional casting, the play feels like an unconvincing museum piece, culminating in not one but two overwrought climaxes. Under Michael Menendian’s serviceable direction, this Raven Theatre premiere can’t enliven
The Burials This Steppenwolf for R Young Adults offering uses the ancient Greek legend of Antigone as
a starting point for an examination of contemporary gun violence. When the disturbed teenage son of a Republican senator goes on a murderous shooting spree at a suburban high school before killing himself, the politician—running for reelection—reacts by embracing an extremist “gun rights” agenda, proposing legislation to arm schoolteachers. His usually dutiful daughter defies him, becoming a spokesperson for gun control. Caitlin Parrish’s script resonantly
Wicked City o JAY KENNEDY
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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of October 13
an overly demonstrative script. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 11/27: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sat 10/22, 3 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-3382177, raventheatre.com, $43, $38 seniors, $21 students. While Our Blood Is Still Young Amanda Dunne Acevedo and Lindsey Barlag Thornton are absolutely in it to win it. Granted, I have no idea what “it” is, and in this “devised duet,” they’re fairly open about that being a mystery to them as well. Like a blackbox studio exercise, the two use the concept of exhaustion as a jumping-off point for personal vignettes, endurance challenges, comedy bits, and absurdist snippets. Genesis isn’t kidding when it calls the project a “messy romp”—by the end, the floor is littered with confetti and spaghetti, and both a mattress and a Slip’N Slide have been pressed into service. Thornton and Acevado are compelling storytellers, but here they’re kicking around ideas very much in development. —DAN JAKES Through 10/17: Mon 7 PM, American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron, 773-4094125, atcweb.org, $15 suggested donation. Wicked City New incubator the R Chicago Theatre Workshop seeks to provide a launching pad for artists,
and this, the first show of its inaugural season, certainly does some launching. Chad Beguelin and Matthew Sklar’s film-noir-inspired musical comedy is a big show that features Broadway-caliber voices from cast members including Lauren Roesner, Javier Ferreira, and Rashada Dawan. As damsel in distress Jo Van Cleave and private dick Eddie Cain, Roesner and Ferreira are a charming central couple with sharp comedic timing and strong vocal harmonies. Dawan delights as unreliable narrator Madam Theresa, a fortune teller and neighborhood gossip who sings “Love Makes Fools Out of All of Us.” The copious references to noir classics like The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity may pass over the heads of some, but it’s a fun ride, with humor for all demographics. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 10/30: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, EDGE Theatre, 5451 N. Broadway, $40-$42.
DANCE R
The Fifth On the cusp of its 15th anniversary, dance troupe the Seldoms has commissioned a work by longtime ensemble member Philip Elson. The Fifth, a world premiere, deals with the nebulous culture of hacktivism and the realm of cyberspace as the fifth domain of war—think WikiLeaks mixed with a dash of Anonymous. Thu 10/13-Sat 10/15: 7:30 PM, Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan, 312-369-6600, colum.edu/dance_center, $30, $24 seniors.
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COMEDY
ClickHole Writers from ClickHole R return to the Hideout, equipped with stories, characters, and PowerPoint
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Cartoonist Chris Ware takes part in a discussion at the Art Institute on Fri 10/14. o SUN-TIMES MEDIA
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For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.
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Death Toll: A Drinking Game Performance Corn Productions’ comedy troupe asks its audience to take a drink every time a character dies in this horror-themed show. 10/14-10/29: Fri-Sat 11 PM, Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, 773-650-1331, cornservatory.org, $10-$15. Spin-Off Stand-Up Spin ChiR cago is hosting a night of free comedy accompanied by ping-pong and
cocktails. Headliner Dave Helem will be joined by Stephanie Weber, Charlie Vergos, Whitney Wasson, Bobby Condon, and Shannon Noll. Thu 10/13, 9 PM, Spin Chicago, 344 N. State, 773-635-9999, chicago.wearespin.com. F
VISUAL ARTS Aron Packer Projects “Inside and Outside Dance,” local painter Peter Hurley displays his artwork inspired by dance, featuring collaborations with the Joffrey Ballet and Ballet Chicago. Opening reception Fri 10/14, 6-9 PM. Closing event Sun 10/16, 3-5 PM. 10/14-10/16, Tue-Sat 11 AM-5 PM, 7445 N. Campbell, 773-458-3150, aronpackerprojects.com.
Hume Chicago “Tender Space,” artist Chiara Galimberti curates a night of performance, poetry, and visual art on the theme of intimacy. Fri 10/14, 6-9 PM. 3242 W. Armitage, humechicago.org. Robert Morris College State Street Gallery “Crazy 8 Artists’ Carnival,” State Street Gallery hosts a reception for its fall showcase featuring works by eight local artists including Kass Copeland, Alan Emerson Hicks, Izzo, Anne Leuck, and more. Thu 10/13, 5-7:30 PM, 401 S. State, 312-935-4574, robertmorris. edu/chicago. Roots and Culture “Best Dream Success,” new work by Adam Farcus and Allison Yasukawa answering the question “Who authors America?” Opening reception Fri 10/15, 6-9 PM. 10/15-11/12, Thu 4:30-7 PM, Fri 4-7 PM, Sat noon-6 PM, 1034 N. Milwaukee, 773-235-8874, rootsandculturecac.org.
LIT R
Celebrating the Seminary Co-op: Past, Present, Future The Hyde Park bookstore celebrates its history with the release of the Seminary Co-op Documentary Project’s If You Weren’t Looking for It: The Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Sat 10/15, 4:30 PM, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn, 773-752-4381, semcoop.com. Grace Bonney The Design*R Sponge founder presents
Efrain Lopez Gallery “Happiness Is an Inside Job Not an Outside Job,” artist Lisa Kirk makes her Chicago debut with an exhibition featuring her installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos. Opening reception Fri 10/14, 6-9 PM. 10/14-11/13, 901 N. Damen, 312-282-3266, efrainlopezgallery.com. Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago “Art21: Chris Ware, Gary Panter, and Hillary Chute,” cartoonists Chris Ware and Gary Panter talk with comics scholar Hillary Chute and Art21 executive director Tina Kukielski. Fri 10/14, 6 PM, 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3600, artic. edu/aic.
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her business book In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice From Over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs. Here she’ll conduct a panel discussion featuring some of her subjects, including Jocelyn Delk Adams (Grandbaby Cakes), Patrice Perkins (Creative Genius Law), and Dawn Hancock (Firebelly Design). Sun 10/16, 6 PM, Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-8716604, musicboxtheatre.com, $12. Mortified Shay DeGrandis hosts R a night of stories about the “politics of adolescence” and the “ado-
lescence of politics,” featuring readings from Shylo Bisnett, Ida Cuttler, Lu Han, Jackie Kostek, Cheryl Kozielec, and John Rich. School of Rock also performs. Sat 10/15, 7:30 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West, 312-801-2100, promontorychicago.com, $20-$23.
MOVIES
More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS The Accountant Flashbacks R scattered throughout this crime thriller show an autistic boy being
harshly raised by a military father; years later the child, a mathematical savant, has grown up into a “black money” specialist for various underworld figures and also a trained killer (he compulsively finishes off every victim with a double head shot). Ben Affleck abandons his W usual charm and swagger to play
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The Accountant
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OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5
AGENDA B the accountant, who habitually mutters and averts his eyes; with the Treasury Department after him, he takes a straight gig auditing a robotics company, but the new job proves even more perilous. For an action picture, this is uncommonly crafty and observant, offering rich supporting roles to J.K. Simmons as a cowardly Treasury agent and John Lithgow as the corrupt head of the firm. The gallows humor is nicely pitched, and no movie has ever done more with the stock character of a comical hit man (nicely played by Jon Bernthal). Gavin O’Connor directed a script by Bill Dubuque; with Anna Kendrick and Jeffrey Tambor. —J.R. JONES R, 128 min. ArcLight Chicago, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero Showplace 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON Bucktown A world-traveling loner (Fred Williamson) arrives in a small midwestern town to bury his brother but winds up sticking around to mete out justice and win the love of a good woman (Pam Grier). After he reopens the brother’s tavern, crooked white cops try to shake him down, so he enlists some friends from the big city to fight back; they take over the department but prove to be even more corrupt than the white men they’ve replaced. It falls to Williamson—with the aid of a pilfered armored assault vehicle—to restore order. This 1975 actioner is worth watching for its vintage dress and décor—that and Pam Grier, of course. Arthur Marks directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV R, 94 min. Fri 10/14, 7 PM. Northwestern University Block Museum of Art
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6 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
The Girl on the Train Two years (almost to the day) after 20th Century Fox hit the jackpot with David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014), Universal Pictures releases a clone, also adapted from a best-selling mystery novel and trading in the dark secrets of beautiful, upperclass white people. Emily Blunt is the title character, a blackout drunk whose husband has thrown her out of their fancy home (which she passes every day on her commute), married another woman, and fathered a child. When the couple’s nanny turns up dead, the cops suspect the nanny’s husband, the psychotherapist she was humping, and Blunt’s character, who can’t remember what happened on the night of the murder. Like the Fincher movie, this plays with the idea that the hero may actually be the villain; unlike the Fincher movie, which was built like a Swiss watch, this gradually turns into a tangle of flashbacks as it races toward a fairly predictable conclusion. Tate Taylor (The Help, Get On Up) directed; with too much of Haley
The Battle of Algiers Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson, and Justin Theroux and too little of Allison Janney and Lisa Kudrow. —J.R. JONES R, 112 min. ArcLight Chicago, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero Showplace 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON
REVIVALS The Battle of Algiers Gillo R Pontecorvo’s searing documentary-style retelling (1965) of
the tough, grinding, and ultimately tragic effort of the FLN to liberate Algeria. Pontecorvo has nearly accomplished the impossible: to make an epic film that convinces the viewer he is watching the real thing. Although the director’s sympathies (with the rebels) are never in doubt, the film is tough-minded and fair; the cast (nonprofessional with the exception of Jean Martin as the paratroop colonel) is superb; the editing and the overall production are deft but not slick—in sum, a knockout. In French and Arabic with subtitles. —DON DRUKER 123 min. Fri 10/14Thu 10/20, 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30 PM. Music Box
The Lusty Men A masterR piece by Nicholas Ray—perhaps the most melancholy and
reflective of his films (1952). This modern-dress western centers on Ray’s perennial themes of disaffection and self-destruction: Arthur Kennedy is a young rodeo rider, eager for quick fame and easy money; Robert Mitchum is his older friend, a veteran who’s been there and knows better. Working with the great cinematographer Lee Garmes, Ray creates an unstable atmosphere of dust and despair— trailer camps and broken-down ranches—that expresses the contradictory impulses of his characters: a lust for freedom balanced by a quest for security. With Susan Hayward, superb as Kennedy’s wife. —DAVE KEHR 113 min. Mon 10/17, 7 PM. Music Box
The Pearl Button Patricio R Guzman, who chronicled the military coup against Salvador
Allende in his documentary trilogy
The Battle of Chile (1975-’79), has begun, in old age, to process his political experiences through stunning personal essay films about the geography and astronomy of his native land. Nostalgia for the Light (2011) considered the heavens as viewed from two observatories in the Atacama Desert, where General Pinochet’s men buried the bodies of political enemies; in this excellent companion piece Guzman ponders the endless Chilean coastline, particularly the waters where some 1,200 Allende supporters were tied to rails and sunk. He also visits the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, at the southernmost tip of the country, and speaks with descendants of the Yaghan and Alacalufe tribes who were targeted for extermination by European settlers. Guzman makes his most important contribution, though, as a personal witness connecting all these things; as one oceanographer reminds him, thought is also fluid. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 82 min. Sat 10/15, 5:15 PM, and Tue 10/18, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center
SPECIAL EVENTS Home Movie Day 2016 Chicago Film Archives and the Northwest Chicago Film Society host this open screening of personal 8-millimeter, Super-8, and 16-millimeter movies. Sat 10/15, 11 AM. Chicago History Museum Music Box of Horrors The Music Box presents its annual 24-hour marathon of horror movies, many of them screening from 35-millimeter. Among the highlights are Raw Meat (1972), introduced by director Gary Sherman; Street Trash (1987), introduced by director Jim Muro, and the silent horror film Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), with live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott. For a full schedule visit musicboxtheatre.com. Sat 10/15, noon. Music Box Older Than Ireland Alex Fegan directed this 2015 documentary in which 30 centenarians discuss their 100 years of life in Ireland. 81 min. Sat 10/15, 5:30 PM, and Sun 10/16, 3:30 PM. Irish American Heritage Center v
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CITY LIFE SURE THINGS
THURSDAY 13
Love, Horror and Ever ything In Between This edition of Hyde Park’s Indie City Writers prompts the participants—including K.B. Jensen, Michael Mills, Kayla Gordon, and more— to read works labeled as romance, thriller, or something in the middle. 6 PM, 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th, 773-684-1300, semcoop.com. F
¥ Keep up to date on the go at chicagoreader.com/agenda.
FRIDAY 14
Ma sh Bash Chicago Judges determine the best bourbon, scotch, and whiskey out of 200 samples, while guests participate in tastings and a store scavenger hunt. 5:30-8 PM, Binny’s in Lincoln Park, 1720 N. Marcey, bunnys.com, $20.
SATURDAY 15
Artist’s Ra lly fo r Freedom & Justi ce fo r Al l Black Lives A peaceful march starting and ending at Daley Plaza, where local artists will give speeches and perform. 1-4 PM, Daley Plaza, 50 W. Washington, facebook.com/ events/1183791331681089. F
SUNDAY 16
Logan Square Fo od Truck Social This food truck festival features more than 15 food trucks— including 5411 Empanadas, the Happy Lobster Truck, and Pierogi Wagon. Sat 10/15-Sun 10/16: 11 AM-10 PM, Humboldt between Armitage and Bloomingdale, facebook.com/LoganSquareFoodTruckSocial, $5 suggested donation.
MONDAY 17
Chicago Id ea s Week Leading figures from the worlds of medicine, entertainment, politics, tech, food, and more gather to talk about life’s central questions. Big names at this weeklong confab include Alicia Garza, Abby Wambach, and Bryan Cranston. 10/1710/23, various times and locations, chicagoideas. com, $15.
TUESDAY 18
Drink N Draw Halloween-themed models are on hand to inspire artists of all levels and mediums. The night also features a costume contest. 8-10 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N. Milwaukee, emporiumchicago. com, $10-$15 suggested donation.
WEDNESDAY 19 Museum Week For 11 days, 12 of the city’s museums offer discounted admission, special exhibits, and more. 10/1310/23, various times, locations, and prices, chicagomuseumweek. com.
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OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7
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For Over 35 Years
Homewood is where the heart is LONGTIME HOMEWOOD resident Kelly Caldwell has a bone to pick with Chicagoans who give short shrift to the city’s south suburbs. “I get annoyed with north-siders thinking we are a bunch of tasteless hillbillies,” says the 57-year-old midcentury-modern furniture collector, who’s lived in the Homewood-Flossmoor area since 1970. “People say, ‘Why do you live so far?’ And I think, ‘Far from what?’ I mean, I’m very close to where I live. You can see the Sears Tower. We’re 26 miles from the Loop!” The promot ion a l sloga n for Homewood—a former whistle-stop farm town turned recreational destination surrounded by five golf courses—is “You’re in the Right Place!” “The community was built for people to come out to the country clubs. They
would have summer homes out here,” Caldwell says. Now the diversity and affordability of its housing stock—“From Mad Men to modern,” the village website declares— frequently lands Homewood atop lists of the most livable suburbs. “It’s incredible,” Caldwell says. “And the bang for your buck is even better!” The taste level is high in his modest two-story home, which he bought in 1988 and has slowly renovated by hand (“everything except the drywall”). Each room is impeccably furnished with modernist treasures sourced from all over Chicago, the midwest, and beyond. As a collector—and one of the administrators of the popular Mid Century Modern Chicago Facebook group, which currently has close to 7,000 members—he’s
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Ç Take a video tour of Kelly Caldwell’s house at chicagoreader.com/space.
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not about to divulge his sources. But stories? He’ll happily share those. “I’ve always been into older items,” Caldwell says. “I grew up in a house that looked like Abe Lincoln threw up all over it. And then being a kid of the 60s, we had a next-door neighbor who had really, really nice modern furniture, and I was always kind of envious. . . . I always liked that look.” When he bought his home 28 years ago, Caldwell couldn’t afford new furniture or decor, nor did he want it. So he started hunting around for MCM designs. A former job driving a van for a phone company left him a lot of downtime, so he’d make frequent stops at resale shops, garage sales, and the like. Favorite finds include a dining room table by Italian designer Gio Ponti sourced from an
MILLIONS OF WINDOWS MADE IN CHICAGO SINCE 1975
Indiana thrift store (“I recognized the legs, but the top looked like it was Formica. Then I checked the tag!”) and a side table by American designer Edward Wormley that was “just beat to crap” before he completely refinished the piece. “It’s like a drug,” he says of furniture collecting. “If you really get bit by it, you become obsessed. I’ve been late to go somewhere because I’m like, ‘There’s a resale shop!’” And anyway, he’s hoping more friends will get out his way and see what the bedroom community has to offer. “When people come out here, they say, ‘Oh my God! This area is beautiful.’” —LAURA PEARSON
Want to show off your space? space@chicagoreader.com
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9
CITY LIFE
POLITICS
Preempted strike
CPS dodged another teachers’ strike. That doesn’t mean the system is fixed.
By BEN JORAVSKY
A
s I write this column Monday morning, Chicago waits with bated breath to see if Mayor Rahm Emanuel will muster the fortitude to dip into his precious TIF piggy bank and extract the few hundred million or so of your property tax dollars to give public school teachers a nominal raise and avoid another strike. The money’s there, as I’ve told you before. It’s just a matter of Rahm deciding to spend it on schools as opposed to some cockamamie development deal—like Rezkoville. You can do it, Rahm, I know you can. But by the time you read this in the paper Thursday, we’ll know one way or the other. If the strike was averted, you’ll likely have forgotten the anxiety of this moment and moved on to the next news horror story—probably something having to do with Donald Trump. But as I wait out these last nerve-wracking hours Monday, I’d like to introduce you to Belle, a woman who can tell us a thing or two about what it’s like to teach in the Chicago Public Schools at this moment in time. Because, people, even if we do dodge a strike this time, we’re clearly drifting in the wrong direction, as Belle’s experiences prove. Belle’s a 28-year-old rookie first-grade teacher at a low-income public school on the south side. Basically, she was just figuring out how to get to the lunchroom when she was confronted with the possibility of her first strike. Something they likely never prepared her for in grad school. A few words about Belle. For starters, that’s not her real name. Given how Chicago Public Schools treats employees who dare to criticize the system (remember Troy LaRaviere?), I decided not to use her real name to protect her from retaliation. I’ve known Belle since she was in grammar school—she played forward on a fifth-grade basketball team I coached many years ago. She
10 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
Read Ben Joravsky’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.
possesses a devilishly biting sense of humor and probably could have made a fortune in Hollywood writing screenplays. But a year or two after graduating from college, she announced that she’d decided to follow her heart and go into teaching. Naturally, I tried to gently dissuade her by suggesting she try something a little more, oh, in tune with our times—like investment banking. At least bankers seem to be flourishing in the age of Rauner and Rahm. To which she said, “It’s funny taking career advice from a guy who thought it was a good idea to go into journalism.” OK, she didn’t come right out and say that. But I can’t blame her for thinking it. Belle’s the most idealistic of idealists, taking seriously our claim that public education is a sacred, all-hands-on-deck mission—akin to joining the army to defend her country—especially if we’re truly committed to eradicating the gap between the Roselands and the Ravenswoods, as Mayor Rahm likes to put it. But getting a job with CPS is not as easy as, say, walking down to an army recruitment office and enlisting. First, Belle needed to go back to school to take the courses necessary for certification— her undergraduate degree in English wasn’t enough to qualify her. After two years at DePaul, she graduated with a master’s degree in early childhood education—and roughly $40,000 worth of debt. (I’m sure DePaul will put that money to good use building that $200 million basketball arena on the near south side.) After that Belle had to pass several teaching certification tests—tests she had to pay to take. Good to see someone’s making money from public education. She started looking for a job this summer, and really, finding one was probably the easiest part of Belle’s quest. Thanks to the school-based budgeting system that Emanuel ushered in, there’s an incentive for principals to fill vacancies with the lowest-paid teachers. So in the open job market, rookies tend to have an advantage over veterans. It’s as though the Bulls had an incentive to choose rookies like Denzel Valentine over LeBron James. Within just a few weeks, she had two job offers. In mid-August she accepted the one from the aforementioned south side school. Her salary is $52,000 a year. She shells out $1,000 a month to repay those student loans.
The well being of kids and teachers alike is still at stake, even with a strike averted. o RICHARD A. CHAPMAN/SUN-TIMES
Now she finds herself the only adult in a class of 28 kids. Apparently, Chicago has millions of dollar for that basketball arena, but no money for a teacher’s aide in Belle’s classroom. The other day, I gave her a call to see how it’s been going. I wasn’t surprised to learn that her idealism was colliding with the reality of teaching in CPS. “My biggest challenge is keeping order in the classroom without being this crazy disciplinarian who’s always yelling at the kids,” she said. “I hate playing that role.” Any surprises? “I broke up my first fight,” Belle replied. “Two boys got into a shoving match. I pulled them apart. It happened on a Monday. I’m thinking—hello to the week!” “I love my kids,” she went on. “I love working with them. But it’s a challenge. Some of them get no help at home. It’s a real bummer. ’Cause you can see that the kids who do have help have a big advantage over the kids who don’t. So how do you keep these kids [who have more support] going while keeping the other kids from falling further behind?” Then, two weeks into the year, she told me, she caught the flu. Something else they might not teach you in grad school: working in a room full of kids every day will expose you to a lot of germs. “We had a field trip on a Monday—I knew I couldn’t miss that,” she recounted. “But we were outside and the flu only got worse. So I took Tuesday off. When I came in on Wednesday, my kids were just wild. That one day with-
out me really wound them up. They need the discipline, they need the structure. I decided, that’s it: I will never take a day off again.” Belle didn’t count on the possibility of a strike forcing her to break that vow. She never thought about salaries when she was in grad school—for her, teaching was never about money. But then she heard older teachers talk about how they’d gone a year without a contract. And how the mayor’s so-called 13 percent raise really amounts to a pay cut. And how teachers practically have to beg for a raise? We say that teaching is a sacred mission. Then we make idealistic young wannabe teachers like Belle pay thousands of dollars to get certified before throwing them into underfunded classrooms, where the odds against their success are overwhelming. It’s no way to run the system. “I voted to strike out of solidarity with my colleagues,” she said. “But I love my kids. I’ve never been so stressed out.” Now, as I wrap up this column, it’s Tuesday morning, and guess what? The mayor took my advice, though I’m sure he’d never put it that way. He cut a midnight deal with Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union, giving teachers raises that he’ll pay for with TIF funds. The deal won’t solve all the problems teachers like Belle are facing—such as overcrowded classrooms—but at least it guaranteed she was there to greet her students Tuesday morning. v
ß @joravben
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Colorful planters add beauty— and protection—to a bike lane on Adelaide Street. o JOHN GREENFIELD
CITY LIFE
TRANSPORTATION
Cycling in ‘the Six’
What Chicago can learn from Toronto By JOHN GREENFIELD
T
oronto’s late mayor Rob Ford was notorious for his crack cocaine consumption, but there were some other white lines he didn’t care for. The Chris Farley-esque politician, who famously called bicyclists “a pain in the ass to motorists,” made a point of having existing bike lanes removed to create more room for cars. This led to a memorable showdown in 2012, when protesters temporarily stopped the removal of the Jarvis Street bike lanes by laying down in the street to block the pavement-scraping machine. But when I visited “the Six” (as Toronto native Drake calls the city) earlier this month, I found that post-Ford Toronto is a highly bikeable place. It even has a network of highquality protected bike lanes with features that Chicago would be wise to emulate. In some ways Toronto is a parallel universe to Chicago. They’re both cold, northern cities on Great Lakes, with consistent street grids and generally flat terrain (although Toronto slopes downward towards Lake Ontario). And since Toronto is a sister city to Chicago, there’s been some sharing of ideas when it comes to improving conditions for biking. The Chicago Department of Transportation’s Bicycling Ambassadors outreach team was directly modeled after Toronto’s Road and Trail Ambassador program. There’s been some friendly competition between the cities too. In the early 2000s, when I worked as CDOT’s bike-parking czar, Toronto was my white whale. Even though Chicago had installed more bike racks than any other U.S. city, Toronto had put in a few thousand more of their distinctive “post-and-ring” parking units. The current tally is about 15,000 Chicago racks to more than 17,000 in Toronto.
Annoying, eh? Much more importantly, our neighbor to the north has us beat when it comes to traffic safety. Chicago averaged about six bicycle fatalities annually between 2009 and 2014, but Toronto typically only sees between one and four fatal bike crashes a year, according to Jacquelyn Hayward Gulati, who manages cycling infrastructure programs for the city. And while Chicago averaged roughly 110 total traffic fatalities annually between 2010 and 2014, Toronto has only about 50 traffic deaths a year, Gulati says. She didn’t have an explanation for the discrepancy. Toronto has its fair share of wide roads—University Avenue, where my hotel was, had eight lanes of traffic—although unlike Chicago, the central city isn’t carved up by expressways. Anecdotally, it seemed to me that traffic was a lot mellower in downtown Toronto than it is in the Loop, with a minimum of excessive speeding, swerving between lanes, and gunning towards yellow lights. I’m tempted to chalk it up to stereotypical Canadian courtesy. The bottom line is this: Even though Ford once dismissed urban cycling as a suicidal endeavor akin to “swimming with sharks,” the belief that Toronto became a worse place to bike during the Ford era is a misconception, Gulati says. Although there were three cases where bike lanes were ground out to facilitate driving, bikeways were built on parallel roads as alternatives. Moreover, under pressure from advocacy groups like Cycle Toronto, the city began building a network of protected lanes. “So, actually, quite a bit was achieved for cycling during that time,” Gulati says. To prove it to me, she provided an itinerary for a roughly nine-mile loop around the
central city, almost exclusively on buffered and protected bike lanes, traffic-calmed “local street bikeways” (known as “neighborhood greenways” in Chicago), and off-street paths. I was impressed by what I saw. On Sherbourne Street, sidewalk-level raised bike lanes were built to replace the Ford-abolished lanes on nearby Jarvis. Unlike Chicago’s sole experiment with raised lanes, which only exist on a couple of blocks on Roosevelt Road east of State Street, the Sherbourne lanes run for about two miles, keeping cyclists safely above car traffic. It would be great to see CDOT build raised lanes that were more than just a demonstration project.
Even though Rob Ford once dismissed urban cycling as a suicidal endeavor akin to “swimming with sharks,” the belief that Toronto became a worse place to bike during the Ford era is a misconception. Interestingly, in places where the Sherbourn lanes pass through bus stops, yellow textured tiles, similar to the material on the
edge of train platforms, have been installed to discourage waiting bus riders from standing in the bikeway. Bloor Street, a busy east-west thoroughfare lined with funky mom-and-pop businesses and the quirky Bata Shoe Museum, recently got protected lanes on a trial basis. The city removed one mixed-traffic lane, as well as a parking lane on some blocks, to make room for the bikeway. The pilot runs until fall 2017, at which point the lanes could theoretically be taken out. But I saw so much bike traffic on the street, I’m sure the city would have another civil disobedience situation on its hands if it tried. I’d like to see CDOT take a similar approach by implementing politically challenging bike lanes on a test basis. Another forward-thinking bikeway strategy was the protected lanes I encountered on Adelaide Street, which are lined with heavy planter boxes filled with colorful flowers. In the winter the plantings are replaced with evergreens and pine cones, Gulati says. My route concluded on Queen’s Quay, a harborfront (sorry, “harbourfront”) street that also recently underwent a road diet. Two of its four travel lanes were converted to make room for wider sidewalks, street trees, expanded plazas, and a new off-street path that sees up to 6,000 cyclists a day during nice weather, according to Gulati. Next, I caught a ride from the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal to the car-free Toronto Islands, bringing along my Toronto Bike Share cycle. That’s one department where Chicago dominates; while the Divvy system currently has more than 5,800 bikes, TBS has only 2,000. After a gray day of riding, the sky cleared up once I reached Ward’s Island, and I was treated to a transcendently beautiful view of the skyline, including the needlelike CN Tower, which is, appropriately, featured on the cover of Views, Drake’s latest album. (Yes, it’s touristy, but if you’ve never been to the Six, you’ll want to ride one of the scary-fast elevators to the top for the paronrama—trust me.) Hopefully CDOT will soon try some of Toronto’s more progressive strategies, such as building long stretches of raised bike lanes, using planters to protect lanes, and installing politically risky bikeways on a trial basis. It would be a shame to let our sister city continue to show us up. v
John Greenfield edits the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago. ß @greenfieldjohn
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11
Read Derrick Clifton’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.
CITY LIFE LaSaia Wade, right, and about 200 other people marched and held vigil for Saffore in Lakeview October 5. o CARLY RIES
IDENTITY & CULTURE
Black trans lives matter A community in pain rallies for TT Saffore, a black trans woman killed in Chicago last month. By DERRICK CLIFTON
A
s the sun set on a temperate fall evening October 5, roughly 200 people gathered outside the Wellington United Church of Christ in Lakeview to honor the memory of TT Saffore—and join a call to action. Saffore, 28, was found murdered September 11 in West Garfield Park, making her the 20th known transgender or gender nonconforming person lost to violence in 2016, according to local and national news reports. Nearly all were trans women of color, and sadly, 20 is most likely a conservative estimate. The murders of trans people often go unreported or are otherwise unknown because initial reports often misgender victims; it’s usually not until trans community members speak out and claim the dead that the public learns of their deaths—and their lives. LaSaia Wade, a member of the Chicago Trans and Gender Nonconforming Collective, which organized the event, was among the people who came to mourn her slain trans sister. She also attended Saffore’s funeral
12 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
September 30, and during the service, one thought looped through her mind: “It could be me,” she said. “Will it be me?” At 29, Wade is young by most any measure, yet she considers herself old for a black trans woman. Some statistics suggest that the average life expectancy for a trans woman of color is just 35 years. That fact is even more appalling when compared to the average lifespan for white cisgender women living in the U.S.—81 years. Within the broader dialogue about black lives, trans and gender-nonconforming people don’t receive the same levels of solidarity or empathy offered to black cisgender men killed by police officers or racist vigilantes. But Chicago activists refuse to let that keep them down. They rallied to ensure that Saffore’s death isn’t forgotten—and to remind everyone that black transgender lives do indeed matter. As the vigil began, organizers invited the group to call spirits and beloved ancestors into the space by speaking the names of the deceased. Many of the names called, including
Saffore’s, belonged to trans people who’ve been killed. The gathering would “begin with tears and end with celebration,” Wade said in an interview the day before the event. While Saffore’s death was cause for grief, Wade noted, she and the other collective members planned the evening to generate more fellowship within their community, and to build power for change. “It’s lonely doing [this] work. It’s sad doing the work that I do,” Wade said. “Nor do people try to understand. And if they do, they try to block it out because it’s not their life. People mean well, but they can still go home and not worry about these things. . . . To understand these issues is to understand your privilege.” Among the privileges many cisgender people take for granted, she said: not fearing for their personal safety while using the restroom, not worrying about finessing every minute detail of personal appearance—even down to hair follicles—so as to appear passable, not having to field constant, invasive questions about their genitalia. “I feel it’s important for me to come out in solidarity for trans women because they’re my sisters at the end of the day, and their lives matter as well,” said Olivia Pearson, 24, a black cisgender woman who traveled all the way from Roseland after learning of the event on Facebook. She noted that because some people don’t believe trans lives are valid, “people will justify their murders . . . [They] don’t see [trans people] as being superimportant to what we’re fighting for.” With the sunlight fading, some participants bowed their heads over candles, while others held signs calling for an end to the overpolicing and criminalization of trans and gendernonconforming people. “The police don’t love us—they want to see us dead, they want to see us locked up,” said Ms. Afrika, a black trans elder. “I was in solitary confinement for three years. I’ve been there. . . . I know what it’s like, and now I’m bringing it to the community.”
Police officers stood just a few feet away, fronting police vans and paddy wagons, and watching and listening intently. The day of the vigil, the collective had published online a statement and platform outlining their grievances with the government and the mainstream LGB community. The statement was also read aloud that night. “We know that the state does not mourn the loss of Black lives,” the statement reads. “We know the names of Black women lost to violence are held up even less than those of Black men. We know queer, trans and gnc deaths are often hushed by Black communities in addition to being ignored by the state. We accept none of these realities.” “The choice of [the vigil’s] location is not coincidental,” the statement continues. Although many resources for trans people are available in the neighborhood, Lakeview “is also the site of the hyper-policing of queer and trans homeless youth, the racist displacement of poor, black and brown communities, a meeting place for the crossroads of oppression at which black, trans women find themselves.”
“We know queer, trans, and [gendernonconforming persons’] deaths are often hushed by Black communities in addition to being ignored by the state. We accept none of these realities.” —The Chicago Trans and Gender Nonconforming Collective
In the platform, the collective calls for government funds to be redirected away from militarization and policing to black and TGNC communities in the form of employment protections, fair and affordable housing, better society-wide gender education, and accessible gender-affirming health care for trans and gender-nonconforming people; it also seeks the decriminalization of sex work, the end of solitary confinement, and the abolition of prisons. Days after Saffore’s death, members of Black Youth Project 100 and other black activ-
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CITY LIFE
A vigil attendee o CARLY RIES
ist organizations participated in an advocacy day on Capitol Hill for trans-specific issues. (The group addresses these issues in its website Agenda to Build Black Futures, as does the the Movement for Black Lives in its platform.) Employment protections and health care were among the policies the groups brought up with lawmakers. In an interview last week, Fresco Steez, digital strategist for BYP 100, pointed out that black trans and gender-nonconforming people experience some of the worst overlaps of the structures that sustain poverty and compound to create a constant state of trauma. According to a 2013 study of transgender labor issues, black trans women face extreme poverty, with 34 percent reporting an annual household income of $10,000 or less. Violence against black trans women also has deep roots in racism and white supremacy, Steez said. Rigid gender norms were imposed on black people during slavery—a time when the bodies of black people were literally
not their own—and left no room for gender self-determination. “We have to rid ourselves of that structure,” Steez said. “We have to rid ourselves of pie-inthe-sky goals of what masculinity looks like.” Pearson and others noted that trans women are subjected to often deadly intimate-partner violence by men who feel “deceived” or who may feel conflicted about their own desires. Only by rejecting such toxic masculinity, they say, can we fully protect and accept all gender identities. Throughout the evening, vigil attendees railed against oppression through poems, speeches, and chants. The march spilled onto Halsted Street, and some demonstrators even shut down traffic for a brief time. Before they parted ways, attendees ended an otherwise somber vigil with a celebration that, for decades, has served as a symbol of the unique strength and creativity of black, queer, same-gender-loving, and trans communities: a vogueing session. Participant Myah Brown led it off with an expressive performance filled with fluid hand gestures and duckwalking, spinning into dips and drops on the pavement. “We do this for TT,” attendees chanted and clapped their hands. “We do this for TT.” v
Join us for a special celebration of the spirits of the living and the dead.
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THE FOOD ISSUE
Alinea By AIMEE LEVITT | Photos by LUCY HEWITT
14 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
N
o, there are no foams, emulsions, or aromatic vapors at Alinea’s family meal. Today chef de cuisine Simon Davies has decided to make murgh makhani, or Indian butter chicken, for the simple reason that it’s one of his favorite things to eat. He cooks it in large pots on the stove. There is no dry ice involved. The jasmine rice, it’s true, was simmered in a cumin and bay leaf stock, and the naan was prepared from scratch, but the components of the salad
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THE FOOD ISSUE
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Q For Alinea chef de cuisine Simon Davies’s murgh makhani recipe, go to chicagoreader.com/foodissue.
are merely tossed together in a large tray, not painstakingly arranged with a pair of tweezers. The most experimental thing anyone has ever prepared for staff meal, at least that Davies can recall, is breakfast—French toast with
bacon. Personal experiments, like a prep cook trying out a tiramisu, are tolerated. But no wild stuff. “It’s important that the family meal is very traditional,” Davies says. Preparations for tonight’s dinner began last night, when Davies began marinating chicken thighs in yogurt and spices. It’s been stewing in a tomato-based sauce all morning. The rice is simmering on a hot plate. The naan has been baked, the salad assembled. At 2:45, Davies gives the command: “I want everybody in J
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OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15
THE FOOD ISSUE
Alinea continued from 15 this kitchen right now!” (This is less a shout than the eerily calm chef raising his voice about four decibels.) The line cooks respond in unison with an almost military “Yes, chef!” and commence whisking cutting boards and sheet pans that contain the preparations for tonight’s dinner service off the three long metal countertops and start scrubbing. A buffet materializes on the center counter with surprising speed: the rice, the naan, the salad (spinach with orange segments, shaved fennel, carrots, and golden raisins), the dressing (an orange-cilantro-cumin vinaigrette), a plastic cube full of huckleberry-grape limeade, and a stack of plates and a pile of silverware that a cook positions just so. In the back, three dessert cooks toss balls of dough into the deep fryer, where they will become gulab jamun. With his glove-covered hands, Davies mixes herbs into cauliflower that has been roasted in clarified butter. The front-of-house staff carries in stools that they position at regular intervals perpendicular to the counter. The Alinea kitchen hierarchy holds during staff meal. Davies and his fellow chef de cuisine Mike Bagale serve themselves first, followed by the line cooks, the dishwashers, the guy who works in the garage in the back alley carving ice with a chainsaw, and the servers and bussers; chef and owner Grant Achatz can join the line whenever he feels like it, and he does, but only to grab a piece of naan to take back to his office. Nobody makes an effort at attractive plating and almost nobody sits to eat, except for the chefs. No one lingers. They might as well be eating frozen Trader Joe’s meals at their desks—which they kind of are. If it’s your job to manipulate taste and texture in ways no one’s ever seen before, it’s a given that you have the technique to make an Indian meal whose deliciousness is entirely unremarkable. 1723 N. Halsted, 312-867-0110, alinearestaurant.com
ß @aimeelevitt
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BellyQ
By MICHAEL GEBERT | Photos by NICK MURWAY
O
ur grocery store is our coolers,” says Da n ny Sweis, execut ive chef of BellyQ, Bill Kim’s Koreanbarbecue-oriented Asian fusion spot in the West Loop. “Our seasoning [for family meal] is what we use to season the [menu] dishes with. So instead of throwing salt on something, we may use fish sauce. It’s a good way to get our staff familiar with the flavors that we’re serving.” That doesn’t quite explain the big tub of Froot Loops on the table he’s setting. J
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BellyQ continued from 17 “Well, there’s fun dessert and there’s boring dessert,” Sweis says, gesturing toward a bowl of apples next to the cereal. “A little sugary kick to give them a start before service.” The rest of BellyQ’s family meal is slightly less quirky. There’s a stir-fried rice that uses up the trim from duck breasts and pork shoulder, some mangoes that were starting to get soft, a salad with bacon and kimchi coated in nuoc mam, more fish sauce, that he describes as “our version of a Cobb salad,” a vegetarian taco filling with corn and beans, and a lentil dish with broccoli stems in a yellow curry with lime, which is both vegan and gluten free. “We try to make sure everybody has something to eat,” he says. “People come in early just for family meal,” operations manager Scott Hinden says of the employees. He’s worked at restaurants that
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Q Eat like a BellyQ cook! A staff-approved recipe for curry lentils and broccoli is at chicagoreader.com/foodissue.
didn’t have staff meals, and other places that did merely as a means of polishing off leftovers. Things are different at BellyQ, he says. “It’s not an afterthought here. It’s kind of the one time that we can not talk about business, and see how everybody’s actually doing, and learn something about the people you work with that’s not work related.” At the table, a cook named Juan seems to set the tone, firing off wisecracks in all directions: he loudly congratulates a vegetarian named Thomas on having something
to eat, then tells a long-tenured cook named Lupe that stages aren’t allowed to have family meal. But he’s totally sincere when he announces his appreciation for the afternoon’s special treat—the aforementioned Froot Loops. Everyone partakes of the rainbow Os. Some fill deli cups to munch as they work. Even Hinden has a bowl, as well as an apple. “The good sugar and the bad sugar,” a cook named Lovell notes. “Yin and yang,” Juan says. “Cooks love food that comes from their childhoods,” Sweis says. “You can do all these complex flavors and then put out some chicken tenders, and they’ll be like, ‘Cool, chicken tenders.’ ” 1400 W. Randolph, 312-563-1010, bellyqchicago.com
ß @skyfullofbacon
www.eatsnarfs.com OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 19
THE FOOD ISSUE
Birrieria Zaragoza By MIKE SULA | Photos by DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS
Q Get Jonathan Zaragoza’s recipe for
frijoles de olla and pork guisado at chicagoreader.com/foodissue.
20 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
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n a rainy Thursday afternoon, a late lunch rush is winding down at Birrieria Zaragoza, the nine-yearold Archer Heights restaurant that specializes in birria tatemada. That’s a very regionally specific variant of the slow-cooked goat dish from Jalisco, in which the caprid isn’t stewed as in most versions, but rather rubbed with mole and roasted slowly until the meat falls apart. Whenever anybody asks me the impossible question “What’s your favorite restaurant?,” I always point them in the direction of the Zaragoza family—it’s failsafe, because this delicious dish is the only thing you can order at their restaurant (be-
sides quesadillas made with freshly pressed tortillas). And because their powers over the goat aren’t diminished by making, say, posole, or cochinita pibil, or carne en su jugo, they do it exceptionally well. Because it’s all goat all the time, there isn’t always a great variety of ingredients on hand to make to make comida for the seven to 17 people working on any given day in the tiny restaurant. So Jonathan Zaragoza goes shopping for it. “They like to eat really simple,” says the chef, who returned to the family business last July after a stint at Lakeview’s late Budlong. “Most of the time it’s some sort of bean and then some sort of meat. It changes
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THE FOOD ISSUE Comida at Birrieria Zaragoza is often dictated by patriarch Juan, pictured left.
daily. Whatever they want, basically, they get. When I cook staff meal, I cook like my mom does at home or my grandma.” Today he’s prepared frijoles de olla (“pot of beans”) with creamy yellow mayocobas, and a stew, or guisado, of pork short ribs braised in an ancho-quajillo salsa made with roasted tomatillos and tomatoes. There’s queso fresco he made that morning. And of course there’s the warm corn tortillas served with every order of birria. He calls out to sous chef Jose Cocone, who’s in a prep kitchen in the rear butchering goats, “Comida para la banda!” (“Food for the band”). Jonathan’s brother Tony is already at the counter with “masa specialist No. 1” Elvira Rosas and “masa specialist No. 2” Mari Fregoso, all working on plates supplemented with chopped onion and cilantro and dried arbol chiles. The bean broth has a remarkable savory flavor given it’s only seasoned with garlic, onion, and salt. The rib meat slips off the bones. The staff dredge tortillas through the thick, smoky salsa. “We’ll talk about the next day’s staff meal when we’re eating,” Jonathan says. Sometimes he makes tortas milanesa, or pickled pigs’ feet tostadas, or enchiladas. Other times everybody just wants pasta. But more often than not comida is dictated by the cravings of Jonathan’s dad, Juan (aka John), who finally sits down to a plate after manning the register. By the end of today’s meal, Friday’s comida will have been decided: aguayon en salsa roja y frijolitos (sirloin in salsa with beans) and coctel de camaron (shrimp cocktail). “The only challenge when Jonathan cooks like this is the customers see us eating and want to order this too,” Juan says. “A lot of it is driven by how busy it is. If it’s not too crazy busy, then it’s more of an elaborate thing. It’s like, What do I want? Do I want more customers or do I want a crazy meal?” Unlike many restaurants where family meal is a collective effort, Jonathan is the only one who prepares it here. (On his son’s days off, Juan orders takeout.) “John-Juan does not care” about the cost of the staff meals, Jonathan says. “He loves good food, and he likes taking care of his people.” 4852 S. Pulaski, 773-523-3700, birrieriazaragoza.com
ß @MikeSula OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21
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Frontera Grill
Q Make Rick Baylessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
Emergency Taco at home! Recipe at chicagoreader. com/foodissue.
By MICHAEL GEBERT | Photos by NICK MURWAY
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Rick Bayless eats his Emergency Tacos one plate at a time.
W
e don’t do family meal because I don’t believe in family meal very often,” Rick Bayless says to me at Frontera Grill as, behind him, four cooks dig into a platter of tacos and the hostess pulls up a gooey length of queso fundido. “A lot of restaurants do family meal, and because of the nature of the restaurant business it kind of gets pushed off to the side and it ends up being a slapdash thing. I don’t feel like it shows the kitchen staff, the front-of-house staff what we really feel about them.” So instead of seating 60 staffers at the same time for a buffet meal, Frontera lets them sit down a few at a time between lunch and din-
ner service and order what they like off the restaurant’s regular menu. “I grew up in a family restaurant where we ate the same food that our guests ate every day,” Bayless says. “Sometimes at certain times of the year someone will make something” and the whole staff will sit down together for a meal. “But then it’s special, celebratory. It’s always something someone’s proud of.” There are a few rules to dining a la carte as a Frontera staff member. The staples of Mexican food—beans, cheese, tortillas—are always available. Pricier proteins like carne asada may or may not be offered, but can be used as rewards for team members who excel. New
menu items are frequently put out for everyone to try. And front-of-house staff, who need to know what they’re selling to diners (and, as Bayless observes, “are in a different economic category” from cooks), can order the more expensive items at 50 percent off the menu price. “You’ll often see a group of servers sharing a plate like that,” he says. The nature of the business, though, can make it hard even to find those few minutes to sit and eat. That’s where an all-purpose off-menu item comes in: the Emergency Taco. This being Rick Bayless’s world, even utilitarian food is at an artisanal level: “It’s a fresh-made corn tortilla from heirloom masa that we bring in from Oaxaca, smeared with
these gorgeous black beans from Three Sisters [farm in Kankakee, Illinois,] that we cook with fresh rendered pork lard and epazote. Then you put a spoonful of guacamole and a little bit of the house cheese on it. And that is honestto-God one of the best things on the planet. “We call it the Emergency Taco because you’re really busy, and you’re starving, and all of those things are always ready and warm in this restaurant,” Bayless continues. “So you stop for a minute, and you make your perfect Emergency Taco. I think it’s one of the reasons for the longevity of our staff.” 445 N. Clark, 312-661-1434, rickbayless.com/restaurants/frontera-grill
ß @skyfullofbacon OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23
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Parachute By KATE SCHMIDT | Photos by DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS
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A
t Parachute, the term “family meal” can be taken literally. Chef-owners Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark are husband and wife, but it’s a family affair in other respects as well. On a recent Thursday at 4 PM, before the Avondale restaurant’s 5 PM opening, Kim’s aunt came in with a bag of fresh herbs from her garden, which she handed over with a tender look at her pregnant niece. And it’s been so from the start; when the couple opened their dream spot on a relatively shoestring budget, they helped defray expenses by doing much of the work themselves, transforming a taqueria into their sleek but inviting space with DIY projects such as handweaving the seats of the stools that line the long bar and crafting the banquette out of the sort of furniture padding used by movers. Their seven-year-old son, Daewon, is a frequent presence—in part because his parents work such punishing hours, 80 per week for both of them on average. But you’d never know that from the tranquil air of the place, which earned a James Beard Award nomination for best new restaurant last year for its updates on Korean dishes that manage to be both innovative and homey. Staff meals tend to be much more casual than the standard menu—for one thing, Clark says, they typically eat in about 20 minutes. But they’re still guided by a motto of Yim Gi Ho, his old mentor in Korea, where Clark did a stage after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America: “If you want to cook well, you have to eat well.” And during our visit the staff certainly did, dining from a spread of Indo-Pakistani food: tandoori chicken (made with Amish poultry), a pilaf with cauliflower, a green salad, raita, and house-made naan. Off to the side were a crock pot of chai, also housemade, and a dessert of vegan carrot cake (from a box mix, Clark owned) with raspberries. While Clark and Kim—the latter formerly the executive chef at Aria as well as a contestant on Top Chef—ate in a small alcove, the staff took seats around the bar and relaxed a bit before their shifts. Twenty minutes later, though, all had returned to work and were intent on their tasks, whether cleaning the glass front door with vinegar or continuing with prep, as Clark and Kim made their way back to the kitchen. 3500 N. Elston, 773-654-1460, parachuterestaurant.com
ß @Readerkate OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25
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Girl & the Goat BY JULIA THIEL | PHOTOS BY JAMIE RAMSAY
Q Rhan Whang’s recipe for
ssamjang sauce is at chicagoreader.com/foodissue.
26 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
K
orean food served cafeteria style isn’t what you’d expect to see at Girl & the Goat, the perpetually popular small-plates restaurant from Stephanie Izard. And most people never will. But on a recent rainy Wednesday afternoon in the West Loop, a couple hours before the doors open to the public, 50-odd cooks, dishwashers, and front-of-house staff from the restaurant, its sister diner Little Goat, as well as some accountants for the Boka Restaurant
Group (which has offices upstairs and to which Izard’s spots belong) line up to fill their bowls with smoked pork lettuce wraps with ssamjang sauce, a mixture of red chile paste and bean paste; bibimbap with soy-marinated soft-boiled eggs; and doenjang jjigae, a soup made with fermented soybean paste, shiitake mushrooms, and tofu. The sous chef who opens each day is responsible for preparing the family meal. Today it was Rhan Whang, who spent four hours making all the food. “These guys are
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working over 12 hours a day,” he says of his coworkers. “You have to give them something good.” Gathering for preshift meals isn’t a given in the restaurant industry, some of the line cooks say. “This is the first place I’ve worked at where we actually sit down and eat,” says Melanie Krawiec, a line cook who’s worked at several fine-dining restaurants. Others report that during their time in the industry, they’ve eaten the majority of their preshift meals while standing.
As for what they eat at Girl & the Goat, that’s up to the sous chefs—but burgers, Italian sandwiches, tacos, grilled cheese sandwiches with soup, and teriyaki chicken with fried rice are all common. “When Rhan makes us real Korean food,” line cook Alyssa Reich says, “it is top dollar every time.” And then there’s hot dog day. “We shouldn’t discuss hot dog day,” says a line cook who asks not to be identified. “It gets very weird. Later in the day, people put hot dogs in weird places.” That can in- J
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Girl & the Goat continued from 27
clude water bottles, back pockets, backpacks, or lockers of fellow staff members, a second line cook explains. Once she found five franks stuffed inside a glove in her locker. “Oh my god!” the first cook responds. “All those things you just said, I did to you.” “Normally,” the second cook says, “we have really civilized, nice family meals.” The respite doesn’t last long: a half hour after the food is served, most of the cooks are back to work in the kitchen. Izard stops by to fill a couple of deli containers with the now-decimated remains of the meal, which she’ll take to eat while working down the street from Girl & the Goat at her newest venture, the Chinese restaurant Duck Duck Goat. When she was a cook, Izard says, she tried to make sure she had time to sit down for family meal. But things have changed over the years as the Top Chef winner has assumed the hectic schedule of a restaurateur. “I usually [just] sit down for breakfast nowadays,” she says. 809 W. Randolph, 312-492-6262, girlandthegoat.com
ß @juliathiel
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Chef Lee Wolen queues up for a Korean feast from his sous chef Eddie Lee.
Boka
By MICHAEL GEBERT | Photos by JAMIE RAMSAY
Q Go to chicagoreader.com/ foodissue to find out how to make Eddie Lee’s mung-bean pancake (with dipping sauce).
B
oka is known for lush, artful versions of essentially straightforward American dishes, but chef Lee Wolen likes to eat fairly light and simple Asian food. “Everybody at Boka,” he says, setting the record straight, “likes to eat Asian food.” “We eat a lot of tofu. And chicken,” he says of the restaurant’s staff meals. That’s no surprise for a chef lauded for his roast chicken. “Roasted chicken is the quickest. We do the whole roasted chicken here, so we always have the legs and thighs. And it needs to taste good.
That’s very important. It’s the basis for the rest of your night; what you eat at 3:30 has to last you till midnight.” Family meal marks a clear divide between the relative calm of morning prep and the intensity of the service to follow, Wolen says. “All the prep is done first, and then we eat” around 3 PM, he says. “Then we usually get all the herbs and stuff together on a garnish tray. At 4:45 we taste everything, all the sauces. Make sure vegetables are cooked, do a line check—and then it’s five o’clock.” Eddie Lee is in charge of family meal J
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Boka continued from 29
today. The Korean-born sous chef recently returned from his first trip back there in six years, and he’s preparing a feast of his native country’s cuisine. As the buffet is laid out in the “terrace” room enclosed in part by a moss wall, Lee explains the dishes: a pair of traditional pancakes—one scallion, one mung bean; pickled radish and kimchi; rice cakes with pepper paste, “a classic street food”; short ribs with carrots and potatoes; vinegary sweetpotato-starch noodles with a variety of julienned vegetables. “I did that,” Wolen interjects. “That was my contribution—I julienned the vegetables.” “Credit for the vegetables goes to chef Lee Wolen,” announces Lee, clearly amused by his boss’s playacting. Everyone is excited to share in the lavish dinner, but as the staff sit, the room quickly segregates—one table is white-coated cooks, another is black-vested servers. It’s quiet except for a few compliments sent Eddie’s way; there’s more phone-scrolling than conversation. This interlude is the calm before the storm. 1729 N. Halsted, 312-337-6070, bokachicago.com
ß @skyfullofbacon
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Elizabeth Restaurant By BRIANNA WELLEN | Photos by NICK MURWAY
Q Mikey Mudrick’s sauteed shrimp recipe is available at chicagoreader.com/foodissue.
G
reen Day is blasting from the kitchen of Iliana Regan’s Elizabeth. It’s 4 PM on a Thursday, an hour and a half before the doors of the 20-seat Lincoln Square restaurant open, and the staff of about ten finishes prepping for a nearly sold-out service and sits down—or leans against a counter or stands over a sink—for the customary family meal. Staff meals typically allow the cooks, no matter their experience level, to flex some creative muscle in the kitchen. But Regan views them also as teachable moments for her
workers: “Chef orders stuff and then says, ‘Oh, let’s do some galantines’ ”—deboned stuffed chicken—“just so everyone knows how to make galantines,” says Mikey Mudrick, one of the restaurant’s longest-tenured cooks. Elizabeth’s tasting menus turn with the seasons, which means that every few months there’s a drastic change in product. Most recently, as the fall chill became more pronounced, the all-vegetarian Harvest Moon menu gave way to the meatier Downton Abbey menu. The family meals surrounding a changeover lend themselves to greater J
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THE FOOD ISSUE Elizabeth’s staff meals vary widely, from sauteed shrimp one night to the tacos pictured. Chef and owner Iliana Regan (pictured at left in blue) sees the meals as opportunities to work on technique.
Elizabeth continued from 31 experimentation, as chefs make use of the waning menu’s leftover ingredients and practice tricky culinary approaches required by the menu that will soon debut. For instance, while Harvest Moon took a looser, more rustic approach, Downton Abbey demands refined, European techniques. Today it’s front-of-house team member Derrick Westbrook’s final day before he leaves to start his own wine business in Hyde Park; he’s requested seafood for his last meal. Mudrick and the other cooks answer with a simple preparation of shrimp sauteed in butter with parsley and cherry tomatoes, and a side dish of brined salmon. The staff toasts Westbrook with plastic deli containers full of sparkling cider. But there’s not a lot of time to get sentimental. Within 15 minutes everyone has gotten their fill, packed away the leftovers, and wiped down the dining room tables in anticipation of what is about to be a busy night. 4835 N. Western, 773-681-0651, elizabeth-restaurant.com
ß @BriannaWellen 32 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
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Pub Royale By TAL ROSENBERG | PHOTOS BY JAMIE RAMSAY
Q Nate Tano shares his snickerdoodle recipe at chicagoreader.com/foodissue.
U
krainian Village barstaurant Pub Royale is best known for its Devon Avenue-worthy Indian food, but it also happens to serve a great burger, excellent hot chicken, a chicken tikka wrap that makes for ideal stoner food, and a decadent doughnut. So it should come as little surprise that the kitchen staff knows how to whip up a really good pizza. “We do pizza a lot,” says chef Nate Tano as he shapes the crust for one of the off-menu pies that the staff often subsist on. For family meal, the cooks typically make use of whatever
is available in the kitchen. “Pizza is really conducive to the space,” sous chef Giuseppe Villa says, because Pub Royale’s naan and parathas are made in-house, and there’s typically plenty of leftover ingredients for dough. This being one of three days during the week when Pub Royale is open for lunch service, Tano and Villa are preparing the staff meal while simultaneously working on dishes for the last customers who were able to sneak in an order before the changeover to dinner. Despite the balancing act, Tano and Villa are mindful of what their coworkers eat—and can eat. J
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Pub Royale continued from 33 “When we hire people, part of what we ask for is their dietary restrictions,” general manager Jenn Fink says. “These guys make sure every staff member has something they can eat, whether they’re gluten free or vegetarian. Right now they’re making vegetarian pizza, for me.” Tano and Villa also assemble two salads: one’s a standard house salad, the other a garlicky tangle of kale sprinkled with bits of bacon. The food is served buffet style. Staff members near the bar make conversation over their food, while others eat closer to the door. The consensus is that the pizza is very good, but the snickerdoodles are the highlight. I ask Tano if he’s ever considered adding either the ’za or the cookies to the menu. “We have a garlic naan, so who knows?” he says. “The only thing missing is tomato sauce and cheese!” 2049 W. Division, 773-661-6874, pubroyale.com
ß @talrosenberg 34 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
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ARTS & CULTURE SMALL SCREEN
The further adventures of Making a Murderer Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey are fighting for their freedom, now with a much bigger fan base.
Avery’s lawyers are working to have his conviction overturned; Dassey’s was vacated in August. o NETFLIX
By DEANNA ISAACS
H
ere’s the good news fans of Making a Murderer have waited since last winter to hear: Yes, there will be a second season. More than 20 million people were unable to pry themselves away from the ten-part documentary series, about the conviction of Steven Avery and his intellectually challenged 16-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey for the 2005 murder of freelance photographer Theresa Halbach. Now they’ll have the chance to revisit the wilds of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, where the lurid crime and dicey trial occurred. The bad news: Netflix made the announcement in July, but isn’t yet telling us when the season will be released—production was under way over the summer, so maybe by next year. At the very least, it will definitely be before the decade it originally took filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos to complete the masterful first season. Making a Murderer brought Avery and Dassey, along with their family, lawyers, and prosecutors, into intimate focus, unfolding with all the addictive suspense of a soap opera. Avery had previously spent 18 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit, and was suing the
county and its officials for $36 million when he and Dassey were charged with Halbach’s killing. Investigators extracted a confession from the clueless teen, who said that at Avery’s bidding he had raped Halbach, cut her throat, and helped burn her body. Dassey’s conviction—contested in federal court by a team of lawyers from Northwestern University’s Bluhm Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth and Milwaukee-based attorney Robert Dvorak—was vacated in August because of questions about the coercive nature of his prolonged interrogation. Still, he’s not out of prison yet. The state of Wisconsin has filed an appeal, and Northwestern law professor Steven Drizin says it could take years for the ensuing legal action to be resolved. Dassey’s lawyers are instead trying to get the now 26-year-old released on bond. Their proposal would have him living in a private home, with support from counselors and a chance to continue his education while his case makes its way through the courts. But the state has opposed that motion too. Drizin expects a decision on bond in the next month or so, and oral arguments on the appeal sometime after the first of the year.
Dassey’s story is having an impact, according to Drizin: “Brendan’s case has put a spotlight on the way that law enforcement officers are allowed to interrogate youthful suspects” who don’t understand their Miranda rights, he says. “We’ve been arguing for years that when police officers use these sophisticated tactics on young people they increase the risk of false confessions.” Meanwhile, Des Plaines-based lawyer and exoneration specialist Kathleen Zellner took on Avery’s case earlier this year, and has let it be known that she’s convinced of his innocence. Zellner filed a motion in August requesting up-to-date analysis of evidence used in the case, including newer techniques for blood and DNA testing. Avery claims, among other things, that traces of his blood found in Halbach’s car will prove to have come from an old sample that was already in the county’s possession before Halbach was killed. Avery also remains incarcerated, but has managed to have an active, if unconsummated, love life since the series aired—he’s been through three engagements since the Holbach murder, and his most recent romance got its own spotlight this month as the subject of two taped installments of Dr. Phil. Avery was
interviewed by phone, while his fiancee, Lynn Hartman (a legal secretary from Las Vegas), was on the set. Hartman wrote to Avery after watching the documentary, she explained, and confided how upset she was over a recent divorce. They bonded during months of correspondence and a prison visit. “Was it love at first write?” Dr. Phil asked. “What did you think when you first saw him?” “He looks like the sweetest little teddy bear,” Hartman said. Avery vowed that this relationship made him realize that “I haven’t been in love my whole life.” And maybe not now either. Two days before the taped sessions were due to run, Avery apparently announced through his previous fiancee, Sandra Greenman, that Hartman is “a golddigger” only in it “for money and publicity.” Making the announcement on her Facebook page, Greenman wrote: “Steve called me two times tonight and wants everyone to know that Lynn and him are done.” v
ß @DeannaIsaacs
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 35
2016
DADA chicago
R
ARTS & CULTURE
READER RECOMMENDED
b ALL AGES
F
THEATER
Here there be mysteries By TONY ADLER o CHERYL MANN
DANCE
A real-life Romeo and Juliet
Organized by the Chicago Surrealist Group, the Friends of DADA, with other outstanding works and contributors.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Joffrey dancer Jeraldine Mendoza to make an impression on fellow company member Dylan Gutierrez. During one of their first rehearsals together, Mendoza approached her now-beau with some choice words. “He was wearing a shirt that had Notorious B.I.G. on it,” Mendoza recalls. “I just went up to him and recited the lyrics [from “Juicy”]: ‘It was all a dream . . . ’” “She even did an impression of a Notorious B.I.G. voice,” Gutierrez says. “I was just like, ‘Ugh, crap, she’s so great!’” The couple’s real-life romance, five years strong, is a boon as they prepare to take on the title roles in Krzysztof Pastor’s Romeo and Juliet, which arguably demands more acting from its dancers than any version of the ballet before it. In Pastor’s politically motivated libretto, Shakespeare’s love-struck couple crisscrosses between three eras of Italian history, spanning from the rise of fascism in the 1930s through the corrupt administration of Silvio Berlusconi in the 1990s. The pageantry and the pantomime are gone, Gutierrez says—it’s “a little more bare and not as grandiose as a classical version would be.” Gutierrez and Mendoza also performed Pastor’s Romeo and Juliet when the Joffrey staged it in 2014. All the same, last weekend they took a night to “nerd out” by watching Baz Luhrmann’s megahit film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes—Pastor himself refers dancers to it for inspiration. But rather than taking cues from actors, Mendoza finds that what works best for her is to pull from what she knows. “What’s easy partnering with Dylan is that I can reference our own relationship,” Mendoza says. “I think about our first meeting and how jittery I was. I had butterflies. There’s so much more depth.” —MATT DE LA PEÑA v R ROMEO AND JULIET 10/13-10/23: Thu-Fri 7:30
www.dadachicago.com
PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, joffrey.org, $34-$159.
October 21-November 6
Friday, Saturday, Sunday 6-9 p.m. 760 N. Milwaukee, Chicago (Chicago & Ogden)
Opening October 21, 6-9 p.m. Saturday, October 22, 7:30 Fabulous Steve Smith experimental and punk band Friday, October 28, 8:00 John Malarkey Guitar and song Saturday, October 29, 7:30 Dada Improv featuring Ethan Burke, Xerxes Flores & Lydia Howe by the Annoyance Theater Sunday, October 30, 7:30 Chicago Calling: Dan Godston, Penelope Rosemont and others Friday, November 4, 7:30 “Marvelous Freedom,” film by Devin Cain Saturday, November 5, 7:30 John Malarkey, guitar and song Sunday, November 6, 8:00 Do It Yourself Dada sculpture
Join
us as we celebrate 100 years of DADA — the imagination breaking free, dreams running rampant,
the mind on FIRE!
36 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
H
arold Pinter started out 1957 as a 26-year-old English actor of no particular distinction, working as “David Baron.” But then, the story has it, a director friend named Henry Woolf asked Pinter to write a quick play for him. Pinter had done some poetry and fiction before, but never a play. He refused Woolf’s invitation, saying he’d need a minimum of six months to come up with something. Yet four days later Woolf received Pinter’s script for The Room, which A Red Orchid Theatre is currently presenting in a rare and interesting, if flawed, revival. What’s surprising about The Room is how thoroughly Pinterian it is. The familiar anomie and the famous menace are already there. The confined quarters. The anxious discourses on trivial subjects. The visitors from nowhere. The sudden violence. An 80-minute one-act, The Room plays less like a story than a series of creepy, half-understood (i.e., Pinteresque) incidents. It introduces us to Rose, who shares a snug little apartment with her significant other, Bert the van driver. She makes him bacon, eggs, and weak tea, goes on and on about how cold it is outside and how very much she doesn’t want to be out there. She’s also preoccupied with what she supposes are the damp conditions in the basement apartment below. Bert reads a magazine and speaks not
at all. The landlord, Mr. Kidd, shows up. He and Rose talk past each other; though he’s addressed, Bert maintains his silence. Mr. Kidd leaves, and then so does Bert. Rose is surprised by two strangers, Mr. and Mrs. Sands, who’ve heard from a mysterious someone in the basement that there’s a room available in the building—room number seven, in fact, which just happens to be the number of Rose’s snug little apartment. The Sandses leave and Mr. Kidd reappears, this time telling Rose there’s a blind visitor in the basement who insists on talking with her. Rose receives the visitor, Riley, with bitter reluctance. He gives her a message. Bert comes home, having finally found his voice. Something ugly happens. In his 1996 biography Harold Pinter, British critic Michael Billington runs through various interpretations of these occurrences, from the psychological to the theological to a compensatory combination of both (Pinter working out his guilt over marrying a non-Jew). Then he writes: “One aspect of The Room . . . is its social accuracy: in particular, its portrait of a walled-in isolationism and paranoid xenophobia that was to become a feature of English life in the late 1950s and that has grown to hideous proportions ever since.” Billington goes on to prove his case by connecting Rose’s insular inclinations (“we keep ourselves to HB Ward and Kirsten Fitzgerald o MICHAEL BROSILOW
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ARTS & CULTURE ourselves”)—not to mention her worry about what may be going on in the basement—to a spike in nativist racism as dark-skinned immigrants from former colonial possessions surged into England proper. Sound familiar? Billington’s observation certainly resonates with the current, Trumpian moment in America, and director Dado capitalizes on that resonance here. Her Rose and Bert, Kirsten Fitzgerald and HB Ward, read as Europe-bred whites while everyone surrounding them comes in hues suggesting origins from South Asia to the eastern ends of the Mediterranean. But Dado doesn’t stop there. Where blind Riley has been historically depicted as a black man, she renders the character as transgender too, putting Jo Jo Brown in a long dress under a man-cut coat. Interestingly, Riley isn’t simply an alien threat: his message for her at least implies the possibility of a less fearful alternative to the realities of room number seven. Possibly because The Room’s relative obscurity means that audiences come to it
with fewer expectations, Dado seems willing to swing freely. She loads her production up with extra-textual gimmicks, some of which are funny (the apartment is overrun with potatoes that Rose has to move out of the way just to sit down) or telling (the Sandses do some premature redecorating during their visit) or striking (Grant Sabin’s set features lots of slammable doors). But as witty as these gestures are, they promote a sense of the absurd that ultimately undermines what happens in The Room. Just because the play’s events don’t resolve themselves into an unambiguous narrative doesn’t mean they’re arbitrary. There’s a necessity to Rose’s experiences, weird as they are. And a reality to her world, disorienting as it is. Dado’s embellishments often do more to obscure than enhance both. v THE ROOM Through 11/13: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $30-$35
ß @taadler
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37
SAT · OC TOBER 29 · 8PM
Singer · Songwriter · Swingin’ · Sultry · Sizzlin’
Never miss a show again.
ARTS & CULTURE The cast of GayCo’s iHole o COURTESY GAYCO PRODUCTIONS
featuring Jazz & Blues vocalist
JENIFER FRENCH S KO K I E T H E AT R E 7924 Lincoln Ave · Skokie, Illinois $2 8 T IC K E T S O N S A L E N OW www.skokietheatre.org/peggy-lee.html Enjoy all the hits spanning the lifetime of one of the greatest jazz vocalists and singer/songwriters of the 20th century, Miss Peggy Lee.
ALSO PERFORMING: Daryl Nitz, Johnny Rodgers, Ann McGregor, Joe Policastro, Chuck Christiansen, Eric Schneider, Monique Moyet
EARLY WARNINGS chicagoreader.com/early
Visit Jenifer French’s official website: JennyLovesJazz.com
COMEDY
GayCo celebrates 20 years By BRIANNA WELLEN
L
GBTQ sketch-comedy group GayCo put on its first revue, Whitney Houston, We Have a Problem, at the Second City in 1996. The Reader’s Mary Shen Barnridge wrote that it kept its “focus tight and its humor accessible to audiences straight and gay, in the know or out of touch.” The performance was born out of a comedy workshop created after Second City administrative director Ed Garza discovered the word “fag” scrawled across the wall in one of the training-center classrooms. According to Andy Eninger, one of GayCo’s founding members and current resident director, the bigoted graffiti was a wake-up call that there needed to be a support system for LGBTQ performers. In “most of the shows we’d seen on Second City stages . . . being gay was the punch line,” Eninger says. The group came up with the guideline “Gay is the given, not the punch line” and focused on representing the point of view of LGBTQ performers. Its 20th-anniversary showcase, GayCo XX: Gay for Play, features sketches from the past two decades that speak to that mantra and highlight how far the gay community has come. From the beginning, GayCo adopted Second City’s process, using improvised scenes to inspire scripted sketches covering everything from personal themes, like coming out and dating, to larger issues in the community, like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the AIDS crisis.
38 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
For some, like former ensemble member Jim Bennet, the sketch-comedy performances energized their real-life activism—while at GayCo, Bennet started working at civil rights nonprofit Lambda Legal as the midwest regional director. In 2013 he chaired the statewide coalition Illinois Unites for Marriage. “GayCo really informed a lot of my strategy on how to reach hearts and minds,” Bennet says. “It was great to be able to take my experience having to meet with the opposition or meeting with people who wanted to be able to adopt and find that comic sweet spot.” For the upcoming performance, many of the sketches being revisited are no longer topical because the state of LGBTQ rights and politics has changed so much in the last 20 years. Instead, some old favorites will be restaged, including a dinner-party scene, a musical monologue about being a “late-in-life lesbian,” and a bit that involves a giant puppet modeled after Eninger’s aging cat, Queenie. The environment is now very different for the new generation of GayCo. Issues surrounding LGBTQ rights have become a part of everyday politics. Openly gay performers are a constant on the Second City main stage or in other more conventional shows. In many ways, Eninger says, the group’s original goal of representing gay voices onstage has been realized. But that doesn’t mean the end of GayCo, just an evolved mission. “There’s an incredible energy from new people coming in who are looking for an outlet,” Eninger says, “I think that GayCo has the ability to find that human truth deep in the lives of people who identify as ‘other.’” v R GAYCO XX: GAY FOR PLAY Sat 10/15, 7:30 PM, Up Comedy Club, 230 W. North, gayco.com, $20.
ß @BriannaWellen
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ARTS & CULTURE Laszló Moholy-Nagy, part of Room of the Present; Rifat Chadirji, IRQ/314/153: Administration Offices, Federation of Industries, Baghdad, 1966 o COURTESY ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO; GRAHAM FOUNDATION
VISUAL ART
Parallel lines By TAL ROSENBERG
M
oholy-Nagy: Future Present” is perhaps the most outstanding major exhibition the Art Institute has displayed during the past few years. The subject, Laszló Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian artist who was based in Chicago for most of the last decade of his life, was a prominent professor in the Bauhaus school, and made a significant contribution to contemporary art and design. At the same time, he’s someone many spectators are likely unaware of—even those who possess a baseline familiarity with art history. Meanwhile, over at the Graham Foundation, there’s another remarkable, albeit smaller, showcase of an important craftsman who’s even more obscure: Rifat Chadirji, an architect and photographer who was a critical cultural figure in post-World War II Iraq. “Art must be matched to its moment,” reads the introductory wall text at “Future Present.” “It must seek to understand recent technologies and to demonstrate changing relations in the world.” One could say this of Chadirji’s work as much as of Moholy-Nagy’s. In fact, though the two shows are markedly different in scale and range, they share a number of commonalities. Both artists were prominent individuals in their native countries’ cultural communities, and both had to flee wartime chaos. Like Moholy-Nagy, Chadirji was enam-
ored of spatial geometry and the photographic image. And most importantly, each person’s output altered the visual language of their physical surroundings. Tension is the perceptible undercurrent of both exhibitions. In the case of “Future Present” (which debuted at the Guggenheim Museum and will next travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the friction in Moholy-Nagy’s artwork is primarily a product of time, material, and commerce. During his most prolific period, roughly the early 1920s until his death in 1946, Moholy-Nagy was a visionary who enthusiastically engaged with the world he was living in. Most of his work was abstract, a series of shapes and lines that resemble architectural sketches or patterns more than paintings. Unlike many artists of the past and present, Moholy-Nagy was zealous about advertising and its ability to provide remunerative opportunities for creative people. He was spellbound by cinema and photography, but his approach was experimental, more avant-garde than his contemporaries. And he supported industrialism and mass-market innovation—he frequently outsourced production of his compositions to metallurgists and contractors, and some of his most famous sculptures are made out of Plexiglas. Moholy-Nagy’s chief innovation was synthesizing various disciplines and styles into a visual format and philosophy that both addressed its time period and made a deep impression on the future. Walking through “Future Present” isn’t just a journey into the mind of an artist but a retrospective of many of the most significant artistic movements of the early 20th century. An untitled work from 1939 looks like something
Joan Miró could have made; Moholy-Nagy’s films seem like precursors to Un Chien Andalou or Jean Vigo’s oeuvre; Architecture 1 (Construction on a Blue Ground)/Title unknown (verso) is a double-sided painting that recalls the fictional Kandinsky in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. I was reminded of multiple design touchstones: the fragmented and mathematical approach of the British electronic group Autechre, Buckminster Fuller’s architectural renderings, the overall aesthetic of the indie-rock group Stereolab, and multiple buildings, lobby artworks, and pieces of furniture all around Chicago. At times “Future Present” doesn’t feel like an overview of a futuristic movement so much as a reconciliation of the present with the past, an attempt to reimagine what’s now gauche or tacky as romantic and inventive. Likewise “Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation” (which first opened at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture) often focuses on modern artwork that coexists with antiquated structures. Chadirji worked primarily in Baghdad from the early 1950s until the early 1980s, when he fled Iraq and moved to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard. Fearing that his creations would be destroyed amid the unstable situation in Iraq, he fastidiously documented and photographed his efforts. In his creative heyday Chadirji designed many buildings that juxtaposed modernist tendencies with the local environment. The Iraq Scientific Academy, constructed in 1965, is a palatial brick-shaped spread with skinny arches around the windows and sky-blue bricks on the front facade. By the mid-1960s Chadirji
was showing an increased interest in Mesopotamian architecture—built in 1969, the Administration and Training Institute for Baghdad’s Ministry of Social Affairs, located in a desolate, wide-open space, is a series of round brick complexes that look like famous temples; the insides are brightly lit, with open courtyards in the middle of the buildings and Mondrian-style geometric patterns on the windows. Chadirji’s photographs are more preoccupied with everyday Iraqi life: vendors selling turnips and chickpeas on the streets of Baghdad, graffiti that reads “pissing for donkeys only,” a promotional poster for Saddam Hussein, and a wide-angle shot of Rowanduz, a mountain town in northern Iraq. “Every Building in Baghdad” is supplemented by the photography of Latif Al Ani, whose pictures often appear to be in dialogue with Chadirji. Many of the images feature glimpses of the architect’s projects, such as the Federation of Industries building, a curving high-rise with Chadirji’s signature skinny-arched windows randomly positioned on the front wall. Each of these photos bears the palpable weight of a foreboding future. Even Chadirji could sense it—he was imprisoned in the late 1970s and was subsequently forced to work for Hussein until he was able to escape to the United States. He was also in a constant conversation with history, just like Moholy-Nagy. Chadirji’s E. Abboud building, a cylindrical skyscraper plopped on top of a rectangular cement base, vaguely resembles Nuclear I, CH, one of Moholy-Nagy’s paintings, which portrays a sphere with colorful geometric shapes superimposed on a modernist high-rise. Judging from his art and writings, Moholy-Nagy likely would’ve been flattered to see someone in another part of the world echoing his own work, yet unmistakably tweaking and altering it for an ever-evolving and globalized future. v R “MOHOLY-NAGY: FUTURE PRESENT” Through 1/3/2017, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3600, artic.edu, $20, $14 for seniors, students, and teens, free for children 13 and younger. R “EVERY BUILDING IN BAGHDAD: THE RIFAT CHADIRJI ARCHIVES AT THE ARAB IMAGE FOUNDATION” Through 12/31: Wed-Sat, 11 AM-6PM, Graham Foundation, 4 W. Burton, 312-787-4071, grahamfoundation.org. F
ß @talrosenberg OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39
ARTS & CULTURE
MOVIES
All singing, all dancing at the Chicago International Film Festival La La Land
T
he 52nd edition of the Chicago film festival includes tributes to Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman), Geraldine Chaplin (Doctor Zhivago), Alfonso Arau (Like Water for Chocolate), and producer James D. Stern (An Education). But what I’m most curious about this year is the festival’s spotlight on the musical, a genre dear to the hearts of many but challenged, since the 1970s, by the rise of rock and hip-hop and the heightened realism of the modern cinema. The series collects new musicals from Brazil, Poland, Israel, Finland, and the UK, as well as a restoration of the long-lost Bing Crosby/Paul Whiteman vehicle King of Jazz (1930) and, on opening night, the midwest premiere of Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. (The latter, a romance between an aspiring actress and musician, sounds more like Chazelle’s dreamy debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, than his celebrated sophomore effort, Whiplash.) The movie musical is an American invention, so we should be proud to see it flower in other cultures. —J.R. JONES
40 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
VENUE
Unless otherwise noted, all films screen at River East 21, 322 E. Illinois.
ADMISSION
Unless otherwise noted, all tickets are $15 ($11 for students, seniors, and Cinema/Chicago members). A ten-admission pass is $130 ($100 for members), and a 20-admission pass is $250 ($195 for members). Weekday matinees through 5 PM are $8; shows after 10 PM are $10. Special packages for opening- and closing-night galas.
ADVANCE SALES
In person: River East 21 (through Thu 10/13, noon-8 PM; Fri 10/14-Thu 10/27, beginning one hour before the first show and ending after the last show has begun). Online: ticketmaster.com/ chicagofilmfestival (individual tickets only). By phone: 24 hours in advance at 312-332-3456; weekdays 10 AM-6 PM.
FOR MORE
Call 312-332-3456 or go to chicagofilmfestival.com
Abacus: Small Enough to R Jail Abacus Federal Savings Bank holds the distinction of
being the only financial institution prosecuted as a result of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, though as this engrossing documentary by Steve James suggests, it may have been a sacrificial lamb. A family-owned business, Abacus provides home loans to immigrants in New York’s Chinatown (James, laying it on a bit thick, stresses the bank’s civic-mindedness with clips from It’s a Wonderful Life). Yet good intentions weren’t enough to protect Abacus after New York prosecutors indicted 19 employees and accused the bank of having purposely sold hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent loans to the Federal National Mortgage Association. James focuses on Thomas Sung, the septuagenarian founder of Abacus, and his grown daughters, several of whom are executives at the bank (and one of whom, ironically, worked in the DA’s office when the indictment came down). The family drama adds an emotional dimension to the strictly legal narrative, in which the Sungs’ attorneys try to prove that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of loan officers. —J.R. JONES James and producer Mark Mitten attend the screening. 88 min. Tue 10/18, 6 PM.
After the Storm In this family drama from Japanese writerdirector Hirokazu Kore-eda, a rainstorm forces a struggling novelist (Hiroshi Abe) to reconnect with his recently widowed mother (Kirin Kiki), estranged wife (Yoko Maki), and young son at the matriarch’s home. The novelist works as a private investigator, surveilling and blackmailing people, and steals from his mother to feed a gambling addiction, yet he adores his son and re-creates with him the childhood pastimes he and his father once shared. Kore-ada has explored the father-
son dynamic in his previous work, most notably Still Walking (2008) and Like Father, Like Son (2013), and brings a gentle, humanist approach to the material. The film was shot in and around a low-rent housing compound in Kiyosi, where Kore-eda grew up, and there’s a palpable sense of connection to it. There’s also a surprising chemistry between the mother and the wife, who are bound by their common love for an impossible man. In Japanese with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 117 min. Wed 10/19, 8:15 PM, and Thu 10/20, 5:45 PM.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
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Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.
Lost in Paris
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American Anarchist Charlie Siskel (Finding Vivian Maier) directed this documentary about William Powell, an elderly academic haunted by his authorship of the terrorist manual The Anarchist Cookbook. 96 min. Leah Pickett inteviews Siskel in the Bleader. Mon 10/17, 8:45 PM, and Tue 10/18, 3:30 PM.
only interested in how they seem.” To judge from this chatty, fleetly edited film, Morris feels the same way about her, but her story does illustrate the dilemma of an artist dependent on a corporation for her materials. —J.R. JONES 76 min. Sat 10/15, 3:45 PM, and Mon 10/17, 12:15 PM.
Apprentice In this ruminative drama about capital punishment, an intricate tracking shot follows the protagonist (Fir Rahman), an ambitious young guard in a Singapore prison, from the death chamber to the hangman’s office, where the camera pivots to frame him behind a set of iron bars. Boxed in by childhood trauma, bad choices, and loneliness, the rookie gradually befriends the veteran hangman (Wan Hanafi Su), a regal figure unaware that his new protege is the son of someone he executed decades earlier. Benoit Soler’s fluid, revolving camera frequently visualizes what the main character can’t verbalize, and writer-director Boo Junfeng treats his thorny topic with sensitivity, but the pat ending is a letdown. In English and subtitled Malay. —ANDREA GRONVALL 96 min. Mon 10/17, 8:45 PM, and Tue 10/18, 3:30 PM.
Camera Buff This 1979 R satirical feature by Krzysztof Kieslowski describes everything
The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography Errol Morris indulges his long-standing interest in photographic method with this slight but agreeable profile of portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, who made a big name for herself with large-format Polaroid photography but chose to retire after the company discontinued the film in 2008. Associated with Grove Press in the 60s, Dorfman took up photography in the mid-70s and shot numerous blackand-white images of literary and musical icons (Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jorge Luis Borges, Anaïs Nin, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Jonathan Richman). But the Polaroid portraits she began taking in 1980, captured in fluorescent tones on 20-by-24-inch film, brought out a new sense of color and artifice in her work. “I’m totally not interested in capturing their souls,” she tells Morris. “I’m
that ensues when a Polish factory clerk (coscreenwriter Jerzy Stuhr) buys an eight-millimeter camera— including his growing obsession with his new toy, his altered relationships with his wife and boss, and the responses of other filmmakers (including Krzysztof Zanussi in a cameo) after he wins third prize in an amateur film competition. Suffused with Kieslowski’s dry wit and intelligence, this early feature provides an excellent introduction to his work. In Polish with subtitles. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 112 min. Sat 10/15, noon. Christine Rebecca Hall gives R a heartrending performance as Christine Chubbuck, the young
TV journalist who killed herself with a pistol during a 1974 broadcast in Sarasota, Florida. Most of the surface tension in this biopic springs from the hot social issues of the era (women’s lib, the trivializing of TV news), and screenwriter Craig Shilowich tries to connect Chubbuck to our modern consciousness by portraying her as a tragic postfeminist hero, frantically busy and chronically lonely. Yet Hall transcends these narrow topical concerns by presenting the charmless, insecure, morbidly depressed reporter as a complex and irreducible personality. Particularly haunting are the puppet shows Chubbuck improvises for children in a local hospital; their wise, gentle stories speak to her own emotional journey, which will end in a performance neither wise nor gentle. Antonio Campos directed; with Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, Maria Dizzia, and J. Smith-Cameron. —J.R. JONES Letts takes questions after the Saturday screening. 120 min. Sat 10/15, 5:45 PM, and Sun 10/16, 8:15 PM.
Daughters of the Dust Julie Dash’s first feature (1991) is set in the islands along the south Atlantic coast of the U.S. sometime around 1900. A group of black women, carrying on ancient African traditions and beliefs as part of an extended family preparing to migrate north, confront the issue of what to bring with them and what to leave behind. Lyrically distended in its folkloric meditations, with striking use of slow and slurred motion in certain interludes, this doesn’t make much use of drama or narrative, and the musical score and performances occasionally seem at war with the period ambience. But the resources of the beautiful locations are exploited to the utmost, and Dash can be credited with an original, daring, and sincere conception. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 114 min. Sun 10/23, 3 PM.
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Do Not Resist First-time documentary maker Craig Atkinson exposes the Department of Homeland Security’s arming of local police departments with military weaponry, including Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) that can carry out even routine drug raids with overwhelming force. Since 9/11, he asserts, the federal government has given out $34 billion in grants for MRAPs and other assault gear, though the expenditure may have less to do with public safety than with fattening up defense contracts. Atkinson tracks the civil administration of this domestic buildup, from a city council meeting that ends in the acquisition of an armored assault vehicle to a Senate hearing where Rand Paul and Claire McCaskill try to pin down slippery contractors. The director also examines the gung ho police culture that encourages domestic militarization; among the colorful sideshows are a visit to a SWAT training camp in Orlando and a police motivational speaker who rejoices in the great sex cops have after they use force. —J.R. JONES Atkinson and producer-editor Laura Hartrick attend the screening. 73 min. Mon 10/24, 6:30 PM. Elle Dutch writer-director Paul Verhoeven, making his first Frenchlanguage film, returns to the themes of sexual perversion and errant womanhood he mined in Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995). An affluent video games executive in Paris (Isabelle Huppert) is brutally raped in the first few minutes of the movie, and her reaction ranges from sad and predictable (she doesn’t report the crime) to disturbing and unexpected (she’s attracted to the
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perpetrator). Huppert is spellbinding as the icy, licentious victim; she seems to be daring the viewer to dislike her character, but the woman’s mettle and barbed wit produce the opposite effect. Verhoeven masterfully stretches the suspense, and his gallows humor lands most of the time. His attempts at edginess slide into exploitation, though, as he entertains the notion that women might enjoy sexual assault and even deserve it. In French with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT R, 131 min. Thu 10/20, 8:30 PM.
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Graduation A doctor and R his wife reel when their teenage daughter is assaulted by
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42 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
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a strange man on the eve of her college entrance exam, and after her promising academic career is compromised by a low score, the father conspires to help her cheat on a repeat examination. Writerdirector Cristian Mungiu was hailed as a leading light of the Romanian new wave for his 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, about a woman seeking an illegal abortion during the Ceausescu years, and Graduation shares with that movie a sense of how personal morality can be misshapen by the institutions of an immoral society. The doctor guards other secrets—a longtime affair with a single mother, a clandestine relationship with government agents spying on one of his patients—and Mungiu notes the various equivocations and rationalizations the protagonist uses to justify himself to himself. In Romanian with subtitles. –J.R. JONES 128 min. Sat 10/15, 8:30 PM, and Sun 10/16, 7:45 PM. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer This gory slasher movie was made in Chicago in 1986 but held in limbo until 1989 because of its disturbing content. Very capably acted (by Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, and Tom Towles), written (by Richard Fire and John McNaughton), and directed (by McNaughton), this, like every other slasher movie, has its roots in Psycho. The tensions developed here are more behavioral and psychological than those essayed by Hitchcock, though the insights into the personality of a compulsive killer are at best partial and perfunctory. What mainly registers is the nihilism of the warped ex-con (Rooker) and his dim-witted friend and accomplice (Towles), who joins him in a string of senseless murders, which the film makes chillingly believable. Certainly not for everyone, but if slasher movies are your cup of tea this is a lot better than most, and the use of Chicago locations is especially effective. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 90 min. Rooker and McNaughton attend this 30th anniversary screening. Fri 10/14, 9 PM.
Imperfection Local musician David Singer directed this crime comedy about a heist on Jeweler’s Row in the Loop. Leah Pickett interviews Singer in the Bleader. 104 min. Fri 10/14, 4 PM; Sat 10/22, 8:30 PM; and Sun 10/23, 12:30 PM. Insatiable: The Homaro Cantu Story As expansive as the great chef-inventor Homaro Cantu was, he could also be maddeningly secretive, particularly about the seemingly limitless number of fantastical, world-changing projects he was embroiled in at any given time. This documentary by Brett A. Schwartz provides some insight into Cantu’s mystifying and appalling suicide in April 2015, but mainly it charts his journey from homeless youth to world-renowned modernist chef with a thousand ideas for making the world better. Cantu’s character as tech-obsessed idealist certainly comes across, though not the madcap sense of humor that propelled his busy kitchens. —MIKE SULA Schwartz attends the screenings. 98 min. Mon 10/17, 8:30 PM, and Mon 10/24, 6:15 PM. Like Water for Chocolate R Based on the best-selling novel by Laura Esquivel, who
adapted her own work for the screen, this delightful piece of magical realism (1992) from Mexican director Alfonso Arau contemplates the unrequited love of a single woman for her brotherin-law, which can be expressed only through the sensual meals she prepares for him. (The original novel even contains recipes.) The title, incidentally, derives from a Mexican slang expression that means, approximately, “ready to boil.” In Spanish with subtitles. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM Arau attends the screening. 113 min. Mon 10/17, 5:30 PM. Lost in Paris The golden age of silent comedy lives on in Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, Belgian performers who deliver the sort of balletic movement, wild pratfalls, and surreal sight gags we
expect from Chaplin and Keaton. This 2014 feature is Abel and Gordon’s fourth as writer-director-stars, and though it doesn’t hold a candle to their goofy Rumba (2008), their inventive visual humor still seems like a breath of fresh air compared to the verbal snark of most modern movie comedies. Gordon plays a Canadian rube who arrives in the title city, and Abel is a local vagabond who takes a shine to her. The middle-aged stars may not be quite as limber as they used to be, but they’ve still got the moves—check out their smoldering dance number in a swank restaurant, to a techno tune whose bass beat causes the other diners to jump in unison. In English and subtitled French. —J.R. JONES 84 min. Mon 10/24, 8:30 PM, and Tue 10/25, 6 PM. A Man and a Woman This kind of syrupy love story (sports car driver Jean-Louis Trintignant falls for divorcee Anouk Aimee) is decidedly not my cup of cassis: it’s full of misty romps in the meadows, rainsoaked windshields, assorted puppies and lambs, and a “bittersweet” theme song that drones incessantly on the soundtrack. Still, this 1966 feature was one of the most successful foreign films ever released in the U.S., and Pauline Kael explained why when she noted that it was “a great make-out movie.” Claude Lelouch directed. In French with subtitles. —DON DRUKER Lelouch attends the screenings. 103 min. Sat 10/15, 3 PM, and Tue 10/18, 3:15 PM. Middle Man In this comedy by local filmmaker Ned Crowley, a stand-up comedian falls under the spell of a hitchhiker who persuades him to murder a heckler after a show. Leah Pickett interviews Crowley in the Bleader. 104 min. Tue 10/18, 8:30 PM. Moonlight A film written R and directed by a black man (Barry Jenkins), adapted from a play by a black man (Tarrell Alvin McCraney of Steppenwolf Theatre), and focused on three stages
Graduation
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ARTS & CULTURE a modernist nor a postmodernist but something closer to Elia Kazan: topical, sharp with actors, mildly sensationalist (this is about the consequences of a woman being attacked by a stranger while taking a shower), alert to moral nuances, but lacking a full-blown vision of his own. As in A Separation, Farhadi privileges a woman’s viewpoint without either sharing or exploring it. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 125 min. Sun 10/16, 5:45 PM, and Wed 10/19, 6 PM.
Paterson
in the life of a gay black man (Alex Hibbert in childhood, Ashton Sanders in adolescence, and Trevante Rhodes in adulthood) qualifies as exceptional for those reasons alone. Factor in Jenkins’s visual poetry—the color blue is almost a character—and the experience becomes transcendent. A haunting piece of high art, this drama moves beyond narrative, loosely connecting key events and leaving broad swaths of the protagonist’s journey to the imagination. Cinematographer James Laxton (Youth) renders Miami as a wonderland of magic and danger, and the nuanced performances of the leads—plus André Holland (Cinemax’s The Knick) as the hero’s complicated love interest and Naomie Harris as his drugaddicted mother—provide the honest emotion needed to ground the operatic material. —LEAH PICKETT Jenkins, McCraney, Holland, and Harris attend the screening. 111 min. Wed 10/26, 7:30 PM. One Day Since Yesterday: Peter Bogdanovich and the Lost American Film This 2014 documentary about the eminent American filmmaker lacks the production value of A&E’s Biography series, let alone the style and virtuosity of Bogdanovich’s signature film, The Last Picture Show. The title may suggest an in-depth profile of the man or a study of his influence on Hollywood, but director Bill Teck focuses more on Bogdanovich’s romantic relationship with ingenue Dorothy Stratten, who appeared in his 1981 caper comedy They All Laughed (see review below) and was murdered by her estranged husband prior to the film’s release. Movie buffs won’t learn anything about the Stratten case that hasn’t already been covered in other media (including Bob Fosse’s drama Star 80), and the documentary’s shoddy production seems unworthy of Bogdanovich, whose filmography demands a closer look. With Jeff Bridges, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. —LEAH PICKETT Teck and Bogdanovich attend the screening. 120 min. Sun 10/16, 5 PM.
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Paterson The eponymous New Jersey town proves to
be a hotbed of poetry and art in this comedy from writer-director Jim Jarmusch, thanks to his beautifully loony conceit that all ordinary Americans are closet poets and artists of one kind or another (even if they don’t always know it). The bus-driver hero (Adam Driver), also named Paterson, writes poetry, and his Iranian wife (actress and rock musician Golshifteh Farahani) goes in for black-and-white domestic design; they know they’re artists and are completely smitten with one another, but their neighbors in a local bar seem less fortunate. Like many of Jarmusch’s best films, this keeps surprising us with its minimal, witty inflections, at once epic and small-scale, inspired in this case by the book-length poem “Paterson” by William Carlos Williams. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM R, 113 min. Sat 10/15, 8:30 PM. A Quiet Passion British writer-director Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; The Long Day Closes) is an old hand at the challenge of communicating characters’ interiority, but he stumbles with this biopic about Emily Dickinson. Trying to fathom the poet’s psyche, he uses her verses to comment on things (such as unrequited romantic love) that, he imagines, shaped her. This works well enough, but some stretches of dialogue, particularly those between the adult Emily (Cynthia Nixon) and a headstrong bluestocking (Catherine Bailey), are so laced with bon mots that they tighten like a corset. Jennifer Ehle is outstanding as Emily’s sister, and Florian Hoffmeister’s lustrous cinematography compares with his work on Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea. —ANDREA GRONVALL Nixon attends the screening. 124 min. Sun 10/16, 5:30 PM.
The Swedish Theory of Love Nordic countries are often held up as model social states, but this provocative 2015 documentary by Erik Gandini (Videocracy) suggests that, while everything looks pleasant on the surface, Swedish society is crumbling. The “theory” of the title refers to the philosophy of the “Family of the Future” program, introduced by Swedish politicians in 1972, that “all authentic human relationships have to be based on the fundamental independence between people.” More than 40 years after this groundbreaking manifesto, almost half of all Swedes live alone—the highest rate in the world—and one in four dies that way. The documentary calls for a balance of personal autonomy and community, and makes a strong if subtle case for why a societal focus on self-involvement breeds racism and intolerance. As one Swedish man puts it, “That the social welfare state is taking care of us is the problem. We should be taking care of each other.” Gandini proposes “interdependence” as the answer but doesn’t provide specifics; apparently future generations will have to decide. In English and Swedish with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT Gandini attends the screening. 76 min. Sun 10/16, 4:30 PM, and Mon 10/17, 3:45 PM. They All Laughed Peter Bogdanovich conceived of this 1981 film—about a New York detective (Ben Gazzara) hired to follow a
The View From Tall Comingof-age movies, with their tropes of alienation, rebellion, and burgeoning sexuality, are reliable (if often disposable) fare for the teen market, but this Chicago-set love story breaks new ground with the protagonist’s self-knowledge and directness. A gangly brainiac at a suburban high school (Amanda Drinkall) is devastated by the exposure of her affair with a teacher. Her selfish parents, unable to deal with the situation, consign her to a psychotherapist, and her younger, dimmer sibling (Carolyn Braver), already an alcoholic, is torn between supporting her and slut-shaming her. As capable as these actresses are, the film belongs to Michael Patrick Thornton as the resentful heroine’s wheelchair-bound shrink. Caitlin Parrish’s disarming script is based on her own play, which was first staged when she was 19; its dialogue radiates hope and defiance. Parrish and Erica Weiss codirected. —ANDREA GRONVALL Parrish, Weiss, and producers Mary Kay Cook and Amanda Pflieger attend the Thursday screening. 90 min. Thu 10/20, 8:45 PM; Fri 10/21, 12:30 PM; and Mon 10/24, 2:30 PM.Sun 10/16, 5:30 PM. v
Clockwise: Geraldine Chaplin; James D. Stern; Peter Bogdanovich o THOMAS SAMSON; CARLO ALLEGRI ; FRAZER HARRISON
SPECIAL EVENTS
The festival pays tribute to actress GERALDINE CHAPLIN (Doctor Zhivago, Nashville, Talk to Her) at the Essanay building, where her father, Charlie Chaplin, shot his first (and last) Chicago-based film. Tickets are $75. Sat 10/15, 7 PM, Essanay Studios, 1345 W. Argyle.
Writer-director PETER BOGDANOVICH (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, Mask, The Cat’s Meow) accepts the festival’s lifetime achievement award at a screening of Bill Teck’s new documentary One Day Since Yesterday: Peter Bogdanovich and the Lost American Film (see review above). Tickets are $50. Sun 10/16, 5 PM.
The festival pays tribute to Mexican director ALFONSO ARAU with a screening of his 1992 hit Like Water for Chocolate (see review above). Mon 10/17, 5:30 PM.
The Salesman This gripping R Iranian melodrama by writer-director Asghar Farhadi
(the Oscar-winning A Separation) focuses on a couple acting in a Tehran production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. One should probably resist the temptation to read some subtle message into this exotic premise, because Farhadi (unlike Abbas Kiarostami) is neither
millionaire’s unhappy wife (Audrey Hepburn)—as a revival of the romance and sophistication of Ernst Lubitsch’s comedies. If intentions counted more than accomplishment, this movie would be a masterpiece: all the right elements are present, chosen with a keen critical eye. But Bogdanovich, a cold director drawn to sentimental material, doesn’t have the warmth to bring it off, and his wobbly control of tone keeps leading the physical comedy into pain and humiliation, the romance into prurience, and the wit into the realm of the sour and shrill. With John Ritter, Colleen Camp, Blaine Novak, and Dorothy Stratten, luminous in her last screen appearance. —DAVE KEHR PG, 115 min. Mon 10/17, noon.
Chicago native JAMES D. STERN—whose producer credits range from An Education to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle—talks about his career at this year’s “Industry Days” tribute. Tickets are $5. Thu 10/20, 7 PM.
The Salesman
The festival pays tribute to British director STEVE MCQUEEN (Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave) as part of its Black Perspectives series. Sat 10/22, 6:30 PM.
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 43
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THURSDAY, OCT. 13 ..............FLABBY HOFMAN SHOW @ 8PM FRIDAY, OCT. 14....................DANNY DRAHER BAND
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SATURDAY, OCT. 15...............THE HOWARDS SUNDAY, OCT. 16..................TONY DOSORIO TRIO
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FRIDAY, OCT. 21....................AND OLD WIND
RIVIERA THEATRE
SATURDAY, OCT. 22...............ANDREW AND THE TREE
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29 RIVIERA THEATRE 8:30pm • All Ages
SUNDAY, OCT. 23..................DJ WHOLESOME RADIO EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM CHRIS SHUTTLEWORTH QUINTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA
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TOM ODELL – Oct. 13 • JAKE HURWITZ & AMIR BLUMENFELD– Friday, Oct. 21 LAPSLEY – Nov. 8 • JESU / SUN KIL MOON – Nov. 13 • SULLY ERNA – Friday, Nov. 18 MIKE GORDON – Nov. 20 • NEW MASTERSOUNDS & TURKUAZ – Friday, Nov. 25 MICHAEL KIWANUKA – Saturday, Dec.3
WESLEY THURSDAY & FRIDAY OCTOBER 27-28 8:00pm • 18 & Over
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LeBlanc THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3 8:00pm • 18 & Over
LAMPEDUSA: CONCERT FOR REFUGEES –Oct. 13 • AMERICAN FOOTBALL –Saturday, Oct. 29 • LOTUS –Friday & Saturday, Nov. 4-5 BRIDGET EVERETT –Saturday, Nov. 12 • JJ GREY & MOFRO –Friday & Saturday, Nov. 18-19 • MARC MARON –Saturday, Dec. 3 SNAP JUDGMENT –Saturday, Dec. 10 • ADAM ANT –Jan. 31 • DRIVE BY TRUCKERS –Feb. 2
BUY TICKETS AT 44 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
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Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of October 13 b
THURSDAY13
PICK OF THE WEEK
Battle Trance 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+
Though still young, Rae Sremmurd possess the swagger of a seasoned act
In noise-jazz outfit Little Women, tenor saxophonist Travis Laplante was all about assault, but as leader of tenor-saxophone quartet Battle Trance, he seems more concerned with surrender. (Drummer and critic Hank Shteamer made this point beautifully last month on his blog Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches.) The long, shape-shifting pieces on the group’s second album, this summer’s Blade of Love (New Amsterdam/NNA Tapes)—according to Laplante, the produce of more than two years of writing and rehearsing—require your brain to relinquish its customary ways of paying attention to music. They never return to a part in verse-chorus style, instead progressing organically and inexorably, like a weather system or a geological process. Changes from section to section tend to happen gradually, and a foreground melody emerges only occasionally. This absence of familiar structures and vocabulary forbids you from using mental shorthand to process this music—with its intricate textures and priestly patience, it invites you instead to awaken to full presence. Laplante and bandmates Jeremy Viner, Patrick Breiner, and Matthew Nelson play with tension as though their instrumental voices were a bundle of cords, tightening and loosening as they’re twisted from both ends. They move from ragged drones to busy, pristine minimalist cycling, and from chrome-scouring unison barrages to choruses of long, sighing whistles; they sometimes sing wordlessly through their horns, working the keys to modulate the timbre of their eerie, pseudo-liturgical vocalizations. They can be quiveringly raw, mosque-mosaic meticulous, heartbreakingly soulful, serenely meditative, or frothily ecstatic, but not even the music’s most frenzied violence communicates aggression. Laplante offers qigong training through a practice called Sword Hands, and his music is about the rigorous and painful process of healing. Battle Trance have been playing Blade of Love in full on this tour. —PHILIP MONTORO
ALL AGES
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Oshwa Palm headline; And the Kids and Oshwa open. 7 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $12. 17+
Though Alicia Walter revolted against her Columbia College classical-music training to focus on writing pop songs as Oshwa, she retained vestiges of that background, forging a compelling, complex, and fizzy sound that landed somewhere between Tune-Yards and Dirty Projectors, her hooky melodies routinely thrown off track by giddy, wonderfully convoluted arrangements. In a recent Bandcamp interview, Walter says she began writing the songs on the new self-released Oshwa album I You Me We while working as a wedding DJ, “getting really familiar with that catalogue, and then hitting ‘play’ and watching everyone be like ‘Ahh!’ [laughs], and having it be a really fun time for everyone.” The experience clearly had an impact, because the new record dispatches hyperactive arrangements for something much smoother and conventional— even as her singing grows more idiosyncratic, with relentless swooping patterns, ornate curlicues, and breathless embellishments. Tonight she performs solo, and it could be the last chance to see her play for a while; she’s moving to New York next month. —PETER MARGASAK
Rae Sremmurd See Pick of the Week. Lil Yachty, Eearz, Bobo Swae, and Impxct open. 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine, $36. b Rock, Pop, Etc Anne-Marie 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ BJ Barham, Adam Lee 8 PM, Schubas Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Death From Above 1979, Deap Vally 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Born Ruffians, Ggoolldd, Laverne 9 PM, Empty Bottle Patrizio Buanne 8 PM, City Winery b Zachary Cale, Matchess 9:30 PM, Whistler F Darlingside, Frances Luke Accord 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Lewis Del Mar, Prinze George 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Devil Wears Prada, Memphis May Fire, Like Moths to Flames 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b
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RAE SREMMURD, LIL YACHTY, EEARZ, BOBO SWAE, IMPXCT Thu 10/13, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine, $36. b
RAE SREMMURD, AKA BROTHERS cum rappers Swae Lee (23) and Slim Jimmy (24), broke out behind their irrepressibly euphoric 2014 single “No Flex Zone,” a big shot of glistening, posi-rap with a hook that hangs in the air like a basketball player grasping onto the rim after a highlight-reel dunk. A pair of army brats, Lee and Jimmy bounced around the U.S. before settling in Tupelo, Mississippi, where they honed their craft as teenagers. Though relatively new, the duo produces music with the confidence and panache of a seasoned act, and on this summer’s SremmLife 2 (EarDrummers/Interscope) Lee and Jimmy direct their emotive, melodic sense of pop toward feelings other than pure joy. The single “Black Beatles,” one of the best crossover rap songs of the year, pulses with melancholy—and yet Rae Sremmurd steer clear of anything morbid, delivering instead a song that allows glee to seep in subtly. —LEOR GALIL
Battle Trance o SARAH H. PAULSON
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 45
Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.
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SUNFLOWER BEAN
CASPIAN
THE LEMON TWIGS JOE BORDENARO
THE APPLESEED CAST
10/21
11/13
JOHN PAUL WHITE
CATE LE BON & TIM PRESLEY 02/04
GUEST
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A N N O U N C E CO M I N G S O O N W W W.T N K F E S T.CO M
FLOCK OF DIMES
LITTLE SCREAM
10/26
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YOUR FRIEND
MCFABULOUS
ADULT BOOKS
HOLY WAVE
10/31
11/08
TODAY’S HITS
46 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
DIVINO NIÑO
Dirty Fences, Ravagers, Mama, White Mystery DJs 9 PM, East Room F Pat Egan & the Heavy Hearts, Flounder, Bosley Mongo 9 PM, Burlington Kelsey Wild, Dubb Nubb, Couteau Sang 9 PM, Hideout Wayne Krantz Trio, Nasty Snacks 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Tom Odell, Barns Courtney 7:30 PM, Park West b Rasputina, Vita & the Woolf, DJ Scary Lady Sarah 7:30 PM, Double Door Lindsey Stirling, Shawn Hook 8 PM, Rosemont Theater b Tyrone Wells, Andy Suzuki 7:30 PM, SPACE b Dance Will Clarke & Sage Armstrong 10 PM, the Mid Gladkill, M!nt 10 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Jacques Greene, Jeremiah Meece 10 PM, Smart Bar Bob Moses 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Blues, Gospel, and R&B Greg Hill’s Delfonics Revue 8 PM, the Promontory b Rhye, Cigarettes After Sex 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Jazz Dee Alexander Quartet 8 and 10 PM, through Sat 10/15; Sun 10/16, 4, 8, and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Frode Gjerstad Trio 9 PM, Elastic b Experimental Lia Kohl & Jessica Cornish 7:30 PM, Comfort Station b International Sadhguru 7:30 PM, Symphony Center Classical Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti, conductor (Beethoven). 7:30 PM, Apostolic Church of God F b Lyric Opera’s Das Rheingold 7:30 PM, also Sun 10/16, 2 PM, Civic Opera House Fairs & Festivals Lampedusa: Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, Milk Carton Kids, Ruby Amanfu, and special guest Robert Plant 8 PM, the Vic, sold out, 18+
FRIDAY14 Donny McCaslin Group See also Saturday. 9 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $15. Veteran saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his crack band worked wonders with David Bowie on the singer’s final album, Blackstar (Columbia), providing a versatile and elastic attack that toggles between hard-hitting grooves and atmospheric environments. The group—which includes keyboardist Jason Lindner, electric bassist Tim Lefebvre, and drummer Mark Guiliana—has made a number of albums since forming about six years ago, each one further embracing dense, aggressive postfusion charged by the leader’s developing fondness for EDM. The thrust of McCaslin’s brandnew album, Beyond Now (Motema), is in line with the three recordings that preceded it, though the group’s covers of “Coelacanth 1” by Deadmau5 and “Remain” by Mutemath don’t say much for the leader’s taste in pop music. Beyond Now was recorded three months after Bowie’s death, and the Thin White Duke’s aura is omnipresent—McCaslin and
company cover “Warszawa,” a brooding classic from Low, while their rendition of “A Small Plot of Land,” a lesser-known track from the 1995 album Outside, enlists Jeff Taylor to deliver Bowie-like singing. The production, by Dave Binney, summons a hardedged sound, whether emphasizing the granitelike muscle of McCaslin’s tenor lines or the punishing aggression of Guiliana’s drumming—not to mention that Lefebvre’s bass on “Faceplant” could fit on an old hardcore record. But as strong as the playing is, the attack ultimately grows exhausting and lacks the dynamic richness and meticulous drama that Bowie could harness. Here’s hoping these tunes sound more oxygenated in the live setting. For this engagement Kneebody’s Nate Wood subs for Guiliana. —PETER MARGASAK
Oozing Wound Rabble Rabble and Dim open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10, $7 in advance. If you missed the gist with Oozing Wound’s last album, Earth Suck, the new Whatever Forever (Thrill Jockey) should nail closed the metal trio’s thesis that nihilism is king (or as one track title from the record delicately puts it, “Everything Sucks, and My Life Is a Lie”). Hey, whatever floats your boat, man. In my opinion what really reigns supreme is that no matter how thick the curtain of grime draped over the scorched onslaught of sludge-choked riffs and maniacal rhythms, Oozing Wound rip and writhe through tracks with the grace of a cracked-open can of PBR ripping and writhing through the muggy, dank stratosphere of a sold-out Empty Bottle show. In short, there’s more than some party to it—and don’t bring your fucking kids. Tracks like “Diver” and “Deep Space”—fronted as ever by Zack Weil’s hateful, shrill yowl—are thrash-loyal screeds that swell more than contract, each eventually ballooning into what it might sound like to light a postrock band on fire and shove it off the edge of the planet (the latter number especially devolves into a coagulating mass of hell). Whatever Forever is without a doubt the biggest Oozing Wound record to date, with dirges like the eight-minute “Weather Tamer” offering a more deep-thoughts approach for the dudes as they happily wallow in feedback and negative space for measures on end. But even with those few-dozen extra yards added to some of the fuses, the record doesn’t lose an ounce of its combustibility. —KEVIN WARWICK
Rites of Thy Degringolade A Hill to Die Upon, Polyptych, and Ara open. 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $15, $12 in advance. My jaw dropped when I saw this listing on the Reggie’s calendar. Innovative Candian occult-metal outfit Rites of Thy Degringolade haven’t released a record since 2005 and were assumed defunct until they resurfaced for the Covenant Festival in Vancouver in 2015—though beautifully packaged reissues of their earlier works kept memories fresh. Founder and composer Paulus Kressman told Factory Worker Media last year that he felt Rites’ back catalog held up very well, and so it made sense to resurrect the band as a live experience. Sightings have still been elusive and rare, and I’m really not
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OCTOBER 16TH Rites of Thy Degringolade o COURTESY RITES OF THY DEGRINGOLADE
sure if they’ve ever played Chicago before. (They’ll also be at the California Deathfest this weekend.) Their sound is an all-out assault, and with time the chaotic black-metal howling seems to play upon the human brain’s tendency to resolve patterns— it becomes sophisticated and complex and full of buzzing insinuation of meaning, like a whole beehive full of muttering demons. —MONICA KENDRICK Rock, Pop, Etc Boss Fight; Bloodsport: the Movie, the Band; Daisy Glaze 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Bow & Spear, Hurry, Aurora L’Orealis, Ro Laren 10:15 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Dumpster Babies, Fatal Figures, John Schooley, Comm to Black 9 PM, Burlington Dustbowl Revival, Miles Nielsen & the Rusted Hearts 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Electric Six, In the Whale, Delmar & the Dedications 9 PM, Double Door Head & the Heart, Declan McKenna 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, sold out b Jungle Rot, Morta Skuld, Product of Hate, Hammerfight, Discarnate 8:30 PM, Cobra Lounge Kaleo, Wind & the Wave 7:30 PM, also Sat 10/15, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, sold out, 17+ Moon Taxi, Polyenso 8 PM, Park West b Okkervil River, Landlady 9 PM, Metro Papadosio, Flightwave 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Rad Payoff; Wonk Unit; Raging Nathans; Fuck You, Idiot 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Radiant Devices, Doctor Death Crush, Flips 8:30 PM, Township Chris Robinson Brotherhood 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Tessa Violet, Dodie Clark, Rusty Clanton 6:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Whiskey Shivers, Dan Tedesco 9 PM, Schubas 18+ Hip-Hop Futuristic, Beez, TJ Hickey, Justina Valentine 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Dance Animal Trainer, RJ Pickens, M Sylvia, No Sl33p 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Benny Benassi 10 PM, the Mid Livio & Roby 10 PM, Spy Bar Tensnake, Savile 10 PM, Smart Bar
Folk & Country Elizabeth Cook, Don Gallardo 8:30 PM, SPACE Bonnie Koloc, Ed Holstein 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, sold out b Steeldrivers, Sarah Lou Richards 8 PM, City Winery, sold out b Wandering Boys 6 PM, Hideout Blues, Gospel, and R&B Chicago R&B Kings, Dave Herrero 9 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Shawn Holt & the Teardrops 9:30 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Vance Kelly & the Backstreet Blues Band, Candy Lickin’ Blues Band 9 PM, also Sat 10/15, 9 PM, Kingston Mines Nellie “Tiger” Travis Blues Band 9 PM, also Sat 10/16, 9 PM, Blue Chicago Mike Wheeler 9 PM, B.L.U.E.S. Jazz Dee Alexander Quartet 8 and 10 PM, through Sat 10/15; Sun 10/16, 4, 8, and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Huntertones 9:30 PM, also Sat 10/15, 9:30 PM, Andy’s Jazz Club Lowdown Brass Band, J-Livi & the Party 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ International John Brown’s Body 9 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Classical Magdelena Baczewska Piano. 6 PM, PianoForte Studios Chicago Symphony Orchestra with John Sharp Riccardo Muti, conductor (Dvorak, Schumann, Hidemith). 8 PM, also Tue 10/18, 7:30 PM, Symphony Center
SATURDAY15 Discharge Eyehategod, Toxic Holocaust, and Nam Land open; Smash Potater opens late show. 5:30 and 9:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $25 (late show sold out). 18+ I’ve long felt that my scuffed, nicked-up, slightly brutalized copy of Discharge’s 1984 LP Never Again—a compilation of tracks from their grating debut full-length, Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing, as well as other early EPs—repre- J
AUTOGRAF & GOLDROOM
OCTOBER 20TH
LIQUID STRANGER
BLEEP BLOOP, PERKULAT0R, SHLUMP
OCTOBER 21ST
POST MALONE
JAZZ CARTIER, LARRY JUNE
OCTOBER 22ND
ST. LUCIA W/ BAIO
OCTOBER 22ND OCTOBER 25TH
HOPSIN
JOYNER LUCAS, TOKEN
OCTOBER 26TH MAYER HAWTHORNE W/WINDY CITY SOUL CLUB
OCTOBER 27TH
NEON INDIAN & CLASSIXX
WWW.CONCORDMUSICHALL.COM 2047 N. MILWAUKEE | 773.570.4000 OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 47
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.
MUSIC
NO EXPERIENCE LIKE IT Joyce Manor o DAN MONICK
continued from 47
Learn to play guitar this fall. Set your own tone. Get in your own groove. Join up with people from all walks of life, from all over Chicago and the world. Play a song in your very first class. Play your favorite songs in no time at all. Find your folk at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Daytime, weekend and evening group classes begin October 24. Sign up at oldtownschool.org
LINCOLN SQUARE • LINCOLN PARK
48 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
sented the perfect medium for capturing the blare of the progenitors of D-beat. If you’re unfamiliar with the relentless, tumbling Discharge-branded rhythm, imagine running at full speed, tripping, and barely keeping your balance as you flail forward in a perfect line. It’s like that. Add in the raunch and bile of Kelvin “Cal” Morris’s gargling vocals and the metallic, industrial-like grind of guitar and bass—all of which often sound like they’re working independently of one another—and you’re gifted with the percolating black mass of Discharge. Or at least that’s classic-era Discharge, the one that helped birth politically fueled crust and grindcore and made a very real impression on that old Hetfield curmudgeon. Morris exited the band in 2003 following decades of starts and stops and was replaced by JJ Janiak, who on the recent End of Days (Nuclear Blast) imitates his creator’s growl with a filthy gusto. And with tracks like “Raped and Pillaged,” “Hatebomb,” and “Killing Yourself to Live,” it seems safe to say that Discharge are plenty good and happy reminding us that we’re all still fucked. —KEVIN WARWICK
Joyce Manor Hotelier and Crying open. 7 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $21, $19 in advance. b Though emo got harangued during its posthalcyon Billboard assault in the 2000s as a genre that gladly nurtured teen melodrama and perpetual adolescence, its fourth wave pushes past those attitudes. Hailing from Torrance, California, Joyce Manor offer the brand new Cody (Epitaph), an album that punctures the notion of emo as populated by a bunch of thirtysomethings with Peter Pan complexes. With an aptitude for poppunk influenced by Blink-182 and 90s posthardcore, Joyce Manor got their start with nervy songs that barely pass the one-minute mark. Most of the tracks on Cody are just a hair shorter than three, and the group plays them with a refined patience that allows worlds to flourish. On “Stairs,” the only tune that clocks in longer than four minutes, front man Barry Johnson (who just turned 30) sings about struggling with menial adult responsibilities at 26, his weary voice imparting a sense of grief: “Oh I can’t do laundry / Christ, I can’t do dishes /
What’ll I do without you? / When your body fails you.” His vocals and lyrics are straightforward but open-ended, allowing his gaze to fix on an uncertain future. Joyce Manor play their effervescent blend of postpunk as if these songs are all that can keep them grounded as they rocket towards a fate unknown. —LEOR GALIL
Donny McCaslin Group See Friday. 8 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $15. Rock, Pop, Etc Drilling for Blasting, Crooked Heart, Retirement Club, Kitchen Experiment 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Gnash, Mark Johns, Goody Grace, Triangle Park 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Haybaby, Glamour Hotline, Bloom, Evasive Backflip 7:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Ida 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Kaleo, Wind & the Wave 7:30 PM, also Fri 10/14, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, sold out, 17+ Nick Lowe, Josh Rouse 8 PM, also Sun 10/16, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, sold out b Papadosio, EGI 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Ellis Paul 7 PM, Schubas Quintron & Miss Pussycat, Hujo, Relevant Hairstyles 9 PM, Hideout Saint Motel, Jr Jr, Weathers 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Savoir Adore, Future Generations, Wilder 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Squash Bowels, Malas, Brodequin, Corphagy, Inner Decay 9 PM, Empty Bottle Vanladylove, James & the Drifters 10 PM, Schubas, 18+ Velvet Acid Christ, Gothsicles 8:30 PM, Cobra Lounge Hip-Hop Chicago Turntablist Authority, Rtst, Toltech, J. Marz 10 PM, Subterranean Enzo Siragusa, Jason Patrick, Dino Gardiakos 10 PM, Spy Bar Dance EDX 10 PM, Sound-Bar Gene Farris, Brett Johnson, DJ Mes 10 PM, Primary Nightclub
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Ida
featuring Elizabeth Mitchell and Daniel Littleton In Szold Hall
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20 8PM FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21 8PM
Rhett Miller / Joe Purdy FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28 7:30PM
Jonas Friddle & The Majority / Tangleweed SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30 7PM
AMIRA Queen of Sevdahlinka
Featuring Amira Medunjanin, Ante Gelo (guitar), Zvonimir Sestak (double bass)
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5 8PM
Mohsen Namjoo ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL
Paranoid London, Justin Long, Sevron, Sold 10 PM, Smart Bar Pete Tong 10 PM, the Mid Folk & Country Steve Dawson & Mark Caro 1 PM, SPACE b Robbie Fulks 8 PM, SPACE b Sideline Bluegrass 8 PM, American Legion Hall Dan Whitaker & the Shinebenders 6 PM, Cole’s F Blues, Gospel, and R&B Big James & the Chicago Playboys 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Jimmy Johnson & Rico McFarland 9 PM, B.L.U.E.S. Vance Kelly & the Backstreet Blues Band, Candy Lickin’ Blues Band 9 PM, also Fri 10/14, 9 PM, Kingston Mines
Nellie “Tiger” Travis Blues Band 9 PM, also Fr 10/14, 9 PM, Blue Chicago Mike Wheeler, Smokers 9:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Jazz Dee Alexander Quartet 8 and 10 PM, through Sat 10/15; Sun 10/16, 4, 8, and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Ben LaMar Gay’s “Beast Need Beast” 9 PM, Elastic b Ghost Note 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Huntertones 9:30 PM, also Fri 10/14, 9:30 PM, Andy’s Jazz Club Tim Stine Trio, Black Diamond Quartet 8:30 PM, Hungry Brain Classical Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Daniil Trifonov Riccardo Muti, conductor (Wagner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky). 6 PM, Symphony Center
10/14 10/16 10/21 10/22 10/28
Global Dance Party: Hoyle Brothers Michael J. Miles with Darol Anger Alasdair Fraser & Natalie Haas The Good Lovelies International Mandolin Spectacular featuring the Don Stiernberg Trio & Carlo Aonzo 10/31 PigPen Theatre Co. Residency 11/4 Global Dance Party: Charangueo 11/5 Old Town School Uncovered: Nina Simone: Reflection 11/6 Hubby Jenkins of the Carolina Chocolate Drops
WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE
10/19 Bulgarian Voices Trio 10/25 Alon Nechushtan & Talat Trio
J OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 49
Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.
MUSIC continued from 49
Ian Gindes Piano. 7 PM, PianoForte Studios Lyric Opera’s Lucia di Lammermoor 7:30 PM, also Wed 10/19, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House In-Stores Lily, Del Dot, Jeremiah Fisher, Jon Monteverde, OB 3 PM, Saki F b Fairs & Festivals Logan Square Food Truck Social: Troubled Hubble, Steve Gunn & Jim Elkington, No Men, Dave Davison, Hecks 2:30 PM, Humboldt between Armitage and Bloomingdale b
SUNDAY16 Johann Johannsson Michael Vallera opens. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $24. b Icelandic composer and keyboardist Jóhann Jóhannsson has found remarkable success in recent years by applying his meditative, pretty, and airy themes to film soundtracks for hits like Sicario and The Theory of Everything. The leap wasn’t difficult; his early work seems like it was composed for the silver screen—the minimalist proclivities providing atmosphere and pulse without distracting attention. His latest album Orphée, (Deutsche Grammophon), wasn’t created for film, though he had elements of Jean Cocteau’s 1960 film Testament of Orpheus in mind when refining the short pieces he spent years composing and retooling. In the liner notes he mentions how the title character spent time in his car listening to “numbers stations,” which transmit what’s frequently considered coded war-time intelligence. With those chanted numbers and bits of distant shortwave static, Johannsson generates otherworldly tension while dirtying up the delicate melodies voiced by cellist Hildur Gudnadóttir and a string quartet featuring members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble—in addition to his own piano, pipe organ, and electronics. Closer “Orphic Hymn” features only the Theatre of Voices ensemble singing texts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The pieces ascend in pitch in gentle swells, delivering a soaring spirituality on which a tender lyricism reaches for the heavens. It all could work very well in a film. Jóhannsson performs with violinists Ben Russell and Laura Lutzke, violist Caleb Burhans, and cellists Paul Wiancko and Clarice Jensen, all ACME members. —PETER MARGASAK
Splinter Reeds See also Tuesday. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ Splinter Reeds formed in the Bay Area in 2013 with the intent to perform contemporary compositions and showcase the possibilities of the reed quintet. The ensemble’s instrumental lineup—founder Dana Jessen plays bassoon, Bill Kalinkos clarinet, David Wegehaupt saxophones, Jeff Anderle bass clarinet, and former Chicagoan Kyle Bruckmann oboe and English horn—affords more punch than the traditional woodwind quintet’s complement of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. But it’s the musicians’ close attention to sonic detail and springy rhythmic sense that make the pieces on their debut CD, Got Stung (Splinter Records), so compelling. It opens with “Splinter,” an eight-part suite by Chica-
50 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
Donny McCaslin o FORREST DYLAN BRYANT goan Marc Mellits that encompasses Steve Reichlike repetition, gentle unisons, and a forceful finale that pivots on some satisfyingly funky bass clarinet. Bruckmann’s “Mitigating Factors” occupies more challenging territory, contrasting monolithic walls of sound with flickering electronics and subliminal clarinet whispers. The program for Splinter Reeds’ Chicago debut includes Bruckmann’s piece as well as compositions by Yannis Kyriakides, Matthew Shlomowitz, and three members of the celebrated new -music group Wet Ink: Eric Wubbels, Alex Mincek and Sam Pluta. —BILL MEYER
Caetano Veloso, Teresa Cristina 7 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $40-$90. b Brazilian icon Caetano Veloso’s late-career artistic burst—a trilogy of albums he began at 65—has delivered some of the most satisfying, exciting, and fresh sounds I’ve heard over the last decade. The vet formed a limber group with three of Rio de Janeiro’s most interesting rock musicians, and they emboldened Veloso to push his voice in new directions, taking more chances than he had since his 1972 avant-garde opus Araçá Azul. Despite working with players more than half his age, his songs are decidedly about things relevant to someone in his twilight years. Unfortunately, no Chicago presenter ever brought that group to town. This weekend he makes his first local appearance since 2002, armed only with a guitar. He’s touring in support of Dois Amigos, Um Século de Música: Multishow Live (Nonesuch), a recent collaborative album with fellow tropicalisto Gilberto Gil on which each songwriter digs into his respective catalog in concert, singing and playing together and alone. By nature it’s a retrospective project, but there’s nothing musty or content about Veloso’s performance. His vocals on the classic “Tropicalia,” for example, sound as urgent as they did nearly five decades ago. He’s undiminished at 74, and as he proved on his brilliant eponymous 1985 album, where he tackles “Billy Jean” and Cole Porter’s “Get Out of Town,” and lays out a slew of his own classics, he can conjure a universe with nothing more than his voice and an acoustic guitar. Over the last two decades or so few Brazilian artists have done more to energize the legacy of vintage samba as Teresa Cristina, who with her band Grupo Semente has added rich new tunes to the genre’s storied legacy while also exploring the song- J
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BAWDY STORYTELLING FRI, 10/21
OLD SHOE, SOAP SAT, 10/22
HENHOUSE PROWLERS, HEAD FOR THE HILLS
Fourth Presbyterian Church
located at 126 East Chestnut Street at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Delaware Place
Tickets for all 3 shows on sale this Friday at 10am! Buy tickets online at ticketfly.com For more information visit andrewbird.net
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52 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
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MUSIC
o AUBREY TRINNAMAN
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book of the great Paulinho da Viola. She dispatches with her band on her recent U.S. debut, Canta Cartola (Nonesuch), instead only getting support from the seven-string acoustic guitar playing of Carlinhos Sete Cordas (literally Carlinhos Seven Strings). Cristina interprets the gorgeous songs of Cartola (ne Angenor de Oliveira), one of Rio’s most prolific and important samba composers and singers, who while in his early 30s disappeared from the scene only to be rediscovered as a car washer 15 years later and consequently enjoy a career renaissance that lasted until his death in 1980. Cristina brings a burnished depth to the music, her full-bodied voice balancing sadness and joy. —PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc Eyehategod, Negative Approach, Brick Assassin, Svlphvrvs 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Jacuzzi Boys, Hydrofoil 9 PM, Schubas Nick Lowe, Josh Rouse 8 PM, also Sat 10/15, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, sold out b Jim Messina 7 PM, SPACE b Particle, Kung Fu 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Quinn XCII, Ayokay 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Sia, Miguel, Alunageorge 7 PM, United Center Simple Plan, Hit the Lights, Story Untold 6 PM, House of Blues, sold out b
Lyric Opera’s Das Rheingold 2 PM, also Thu 10/13, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House Skokie Valley Symphony Orchestra Robert Hasty, conductor. 3 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie Fairs & Festivals Logan Square Food Truck Social: Impala Sound Champions, RP Boo, Open Mike Eagle, Brokeback, Bottletree 2 PM, Humboldt between Armitage and Bloomingdale b POWOPA!: Al Scorch, Fat Babies, Reginald Robinson, Devil in A Woodpile, Bottlesnakes, Paulina Hollers, and others 1 PM, Hideout Snow Burial, Druids, Cantharone, Stander 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ C.W. Stoneking, WT Newton & the Ozark Blood 8 PM, Beat Kitchen White Fang, No Parents, Birth Defects, TV Slime 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dance Autograf, Goldroom, Win & Woo 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Michael Serafini, Garrett David, Tim Zawada, Shiro Schwarz 10 PM, Smart Bar Folk & Country Michael J. Miles & Darol Anger 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Blues, Gospel, and R&B Bilal 8 PM, also Mon 10/17, 8 PM, City Winery b
Toni Braxton, Joe 7:30 PM, Arie Crown Theater Citizens & Saints, Kings Kaleidoscope 7 PM, Subterranean, sold out b Jazz Dee Alexander Quartet 4, 8, and 10 PM, also Thu 10/13 through Sat 10/15, 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Mike Finnerty & the Heat Merchants 7 PM, Red Line Tap New Context 9 PM, Whistler F Greg Ward, Jim Baker, and Charles Rumback; Marc Riordan 9 PM, Hungry Brain International Funkadesi 9 PM, the Promontory, 18+ Classical Nazar Dzhuryn & Irina Feoktistova Cello and piano. 3 PM, PianoForte Studios
MONDAY17 Rock, Pop, Etc Dowsing, Slingshot Dakota, Kississippi, Ratboys 8 PM, Burlington Elephant Stone, Diagonal 8 PM, Schubas Rhone, Au Revoir, Man Mountain 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Sex Jams, Mile Me Deaf, Richard Vain 7 PM, Subterranean 17+ William Control, Mr. Agitator, Dead Split Egos 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Folk & Country Dan Whitaker & the Shinebenders 7:30 PM, Hideout
J
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 53
Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.
MUSIC continued from 53
Blues, Gospel, and R&B Bilal 8 PM, also Sun 10/16, 8 PM, City Winery b Jazz Dan Burke Quintet 9:30 PM, Whistler F Jake Wark & Ben Pederson Quintet; Matt Piet & Ryan Packard 9 PM, Elastic b Experimental Ono, Pariuh, Lala Lala 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Classical Eric Owens, Piotr Beczala, and Hlengiwe Mkhwanazi 7:30 PM, Harris Theater In-Stores Manuel T 7:30 PM, Myopic Books F b
JANUARY 19 - w/ North Mississippi Allstars JANUARY 20 - An Evening With JANUARY 21 - An Evening With
TICKETS ON SALE THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13 AT 10AM
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WWW.THECHICAGOTHEATRE.COM
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysics for People in a Hurry MAY 16, 2017
On Sale Friday, October 14 at 10am www.thechicagotheatre.com
The Chicago Theatre provides disabled accommodations and sells tickets to disabled individuals through our Disabled Services department, which may be reached Ticketmaster orders are subject to service charges. at 888-609-7599 any weekday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
54 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
TUESDAY18 Splinter Reeds Works by Wubbels, Mellits, Shlomowitz, Ryan Brown, and Erik DeLuca. See Sunday. 7:30 PM, Recital Hall L285, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1040 W. Harrison, news.uic. edu. F b Rock, Pop, Etc Billy Bragg, Joe Henry 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Easy Habits, Melted, Bad Sons 9 PM, East Room F Anthony Jay Sanders, Stevenson, Leaner, Laverne 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Sticky Fingers, Sneezy 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Tesseract, Outrun the Sunlight, Sioum 6 PM, Bottom Lounge Kelsey Waldon, K Phillips, Brother Brothers 8 PM, Schubas Folk & Country Maria Muldaur, Kristin Cotts 7:30 PM, SPACE b Jazz Wills McKenna Quintet 9:30 PM, Whistler F Greg Ward 9 PM, Hungry Brain F Experimental Ariadne, James Connolly, Jon Cates 9 PM, Elastic b Teddy Rankin-Parker 6 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art b Jason Soliday, Anthony Soliday, Anthony Janas, Jeremy Fisher, Aaron Zarzutski, Bucketbrigade 9 PM, Empty Bottle Classical Chicago Symphony Orchestra with John Sharp Riccardo Muti, conductor (Dvorak, Schumann, Hidemith). 7:30 PM, also Fri 10/14, 8 PM, Symphony Center
WEDNESDAY19 Rock, Pop, Etc Cosmonauts, Shah Jahan, Hair 9 PM, East Room Cute Is What We Aim For, Sleep on It 8 PM, Subterranean, sold out, 17+ 888, Moth & the Flame, Knox Hamilton 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ The Garden, So Pitted, Heyrocco 7:30 PM, 1st Ward b Tommy Keene, John San Juan 9 PM, Hideout Garrett Klahn & the Surrounding Areas, All Eyes West, D.H. Currier 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Lil Tits, Breathing Light, Pussy Foot 9 PM, Empty Bottle
Caetano Veloso, Teresa Cristina o FILIPE MARQUES; FRANCOIS GUILLOT
Malevolent Creation, Incantation 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Sales, I.E. Kokoro, Dimwaves 7 PM, Schubas b Jazz Emmet Cohen Trio Piano. 7:30 PM, PianoForte Studios Harold Lopez-Nussa 7:30 PM, SPACE b Spring Roll 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Experimental Zach Moore, Jen Hill, Peter Maunu, Aaron Zarzutzki 9 PM, Beat Kitchen F Gregory Uhlmann, Maren Celest 9 PM, Whistler F International Bulgarian Voices Trio 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music F b Les Nubians 8 PM, City Winery b Classical Civic Orchestra of Chicago Nicholas Kraemer, conductor (Britten, Beethoven). 8 PM, Symphony Center Emerson String Quartet Beethoven, Bartok, Mendelssohn. 7:30 PM, Harris Theater Alex Klein & Kuang-Hao Huang Oboe and piano. 12:15 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center F b Lyric Opera’s Lucia di Lammermoor 7:30 PM, also Sat 10/15, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House v
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SMYTH | $$$$$
177 N. Ada 773-913-3773 smythandtheloyalist.com
NEW REVIEW
Don’t sleep on Smyth
The fine-dining sibling to the Loyalist is worth a splurge. By MIKE SULA
C
hicago is in the midst of a surge in high-ticket tasting menus in restaurants operated by husband-and-wife teams. Chef Noah Sandoval and wife Cara Sandoval opened Oriole earlier this summer. Elske, from Blackbird vets David and Anna Posey, is on its way. And from chef John Shields and pastry chef Karen Urie Shields there’s Smyth. They join an increasingly crowded field populated by vaunted temples to high gastronomy such as Alinea and Grace as well as more relaxed and whimsical operations like 42 Grams, El Ideas, Elizabeth, and Schwa. I’m a bit skeptical that there are enough deeppocketed fine-dining zealots from here and
abroad to sustain this environment, but for now it’s a gilded age. Smyth, I suspect, has staying power, and not just because its high-volume subterranean sister the Loyalist might sell enough cocktails and cheeseburgers to support the doings upstairs, where menus are $135 for eight courses or $195 for 12, with beverage pairings for $85 and $125 respectively. That’s because the Shieldses’ current menu, which leans gently toward the oceanic and the Japanese, with gutsy ingredients and savory desserts, shows more than enough originality and imagination to keep it in mind long after you’ve dropped such serious coin on the ticket.
Tomato-peach sorbet with spicy flowers o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS
The Shieldses met while working at Charlie Trotter’s. She came from Tru. He moved on to Alinea. In 2008 they both decamped for Appalachia and opened Town House in Chilhowie, Virginia, 343 miles from Washington, D.C., from whence a good many of their guests made pilgrimages. Banking on subsequent national acclaim, Smyth can probably count on a good many of its own destination diners here in flyover country. The room is considerably more warm and inviting than that of the Loyalist. Oriental rugs soften the floor, and tall windows let in the light on one of the most visually accessible open kitchens in the city, where you can watch cooks tweeze the briny sea beans atop the nasturtium-cream-garnished sunchoke chip that serves as the first bite. That promising amuse is somewhat undermined by the seeming absurdity of its successor: a shot of warm seawater harboring a single leaf of sea lettuce. Still, the combined salinity of the two mouthfuls primes the palate for what’s to follow: a succession of texturally unorthodox presentations, augmented and often built on produce from the 20-acre downstate farm growing more than a hundred different varieties of herbs, flowers, and vegetables on behalf of the two restaurants. That farm contributes to two astonishing tomato-based dishes on the opening menu. One starting the meal finds a briny Beausoleil oyster swimming in a savory tomato slush punctuated by satisfying pops from stray fish roe. The other is a tomato-peach sorbet with apricot-kernel liqueur that ends the meal bedecked with a riot of brilliantly colored and spicy flowers. Shields isn’t afraid to confront his guests between these two bright bookends, say with an herbal salad of softly cartilaginous duck tongues, their appealing squishiness offset by crunchy black walnuts, all dressed in a jus made from roasted squid. Or Dungeness crab with foie gras and kani miso, in which the crab’s custardy innards go down easy with the help of crunchy crackers made from reduced dashi. The richness of a sumptuous, ivorycolored grilled kanpachi belly bathing in beurre blanc boosted with the glutamic power of the fermented rice kogi is balanced by a J
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 55
sipsbits
S P O N S O R E D
N E I G H B O R H O O D
C O N T E N T
Chicago has always been a city of distinct neighborhoods with their own sense of identity and tradition — and each with standout bars and restaurants that are worthy of a haul on the El or bucking up for parking. Explore some local faves here, then head out for a taste of the real thing!
ALIVEONE // LINCOLN PARK Wednesday: 1/2 price aliveOne signature cocktails
DISTILLED CHICAGO // LINCOLN PARK Saturday Brunch (11am-2pm) Bottomless Bloodies & Mimosas
FITZGERALDS // BERWYN Everyday: $6 Firestone Walker Opal pints
ALIVEONE .COM
D I STI LLE D C H I CAG O.CO M
FITZGERALDSNIGHTCLUB .COM
LINCOLN HALL // LINCOLN PARK $8 Modelo Especial Tallboy + shot of tequila
MONTI’S // LINCOLN SQUARE Friday: $5 Martinis, Lemon Drop, Cinnamon Apple
MOTOR ROW BREWING // NEAR SOUTHSIDE Thu, Fri, Tue, Wed: Happy Hour noon-6pm, w$2 off all beers
L H - S T. C O M
I LOV E M O NTI S .CO M
MOTORROWB REWI NG .COM
PHYLILIS’ MUSICAL INN // WICKER PARK Everyday: $3.75 Moosehead pints and $2.50 Hamms cans
REGGIES // SOUTH LOOP Wednesday $4 Stoli/Absolut and Soco Cocktails
SCHUBAS // LAKEVIEW $7 Modelo Especial + Don Julio shot
7 7 3 . 4 8 6 .9 8 62
REGGIESLIVE .COM
L H - S T. C O M
BERWYN
FAVE > OYSTERS & CEVICHE
OLIVER’S // 6 9 0 8 W I N D S O R // C H E F - O L I V E R S .C O M Oliver’s features contemporary American with seasonal international dishes—that includes prime cuts, fresh seafood and farm to table specialties in a relaxed casual environment. Appetizers include oysters, shrimp, sliders and delicious small plates. Chef Oliver’s famous scallops merited a special TV appearance on ABC’s 190 North and several mentions in Chicago publications. The exceptional fare is complimented by a wide variety of signature martinis, extensive selection of craft beers and a unique wine list.
“Outstanding! Wonderful appetizers & martinis!” — PAMELA B. / YELP 56 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
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TELE-FUNDRAISING: FOR VETERANS DAY. American Veterans helping Veterans.
Send resume and cover letter to: Erin Campbell, HR Director – Zekelman Industries, Inc., 227 W. Monroe St., 26th floor, Chicago, IL 60606
SALES & MARKETING
food & drink FOOD PACKER & TELEPHONE PERSON. Full & Part-time. Yu Choy Restaurant, 312-2459700, 312-527-4400. 548 N. Wells, Chicago. Apply in person.
General
Squab, pineapple sage leaves, fresh and fermented pea miso ! DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS
clear your sinuses and prime your alimentary canal for breakfast. Smyth is operating with the Tock ticketing system, but currently there are enough open seats that if the computer rebuffs you, you might just try calling. It’s worth a shot to experience the wonderful and occasionally weird return of these two talented chefs before the place gets truly packed. v
" @Mike Sula
A UTH E NTI C PH I LLY C H E E S E STEA KS!
T F A ER R C BE
APO, SAP MM, and SAP PP. Must have experience with SAP BW and SAP APO including DEP, SNP, PPDS, CIF, CATP, Block Planning and VMI in a B2B industry.
Felons need not apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations. Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035
continued from 55 medley of fresh green herbs. A humble scrap of charred white cabbage conceals sweet lobster drenched in reduced whey and comes with a dense, spherical beef-fat brioche that should last anyone through the next several courses. Meatier dishes are introduced by the squabs that hang above the kitchen’s wood grill; on the plate they’re dressed in pineapple sage leaves and served with a duo of fresh and fermented pea miso, an herb-forward dish sweetened with reduced grape juice. Lamb saddle brings the proteins to a climax of unmatched intensity—its accompaniments of black garlic sauce and seaweed marmite should be used sparingly. From there Urie Shields enters the fray with a kind of energy bar pressed from chocolate, huckleberries, and preserved shiitake mushrooms, then a light, one-bite honey-custard tart. It’s hardly preparation for one of the most astonishing desserts I’ve seen this year: a glistening egg yolk, colored like an alien sun, cured for 24 hours in black licorice molasses until it achieves a dense, candylike texture. This visually arresting orb with the taste and texture of rich caramel is surrounded by an figurative albumen of thick alabaster yogurt, all concealing a black raspberry understory—a miraculous dish that could easily pull a brunch shift. If you opt for pairings—and you should— you’ll be treated to wines as varied as a nutty amber-colored Slovenian Rebu la (aka Ribolla), a white Burgundy made from Aligoté rather than chardonnay grapes, and an herbal rhubarb amaro at the finish that’ll
JOBS
S P DR EC INK IA LS
A
4757 N TALMAN · 773.942.6012 · ILOVEMONTIS.COM ·
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@ILOVEMONTIS
SENIOR APPLICATIONS ANALYST - Manage key business partner relationships for assigned project areas and internal customers. Specifically, assist business users and business process owners in the areas of business process reengineering, systems architecture, SAP design, application development, integration, testing and deployment. Develop, implement and roll out solutions utilizing SAP SCM globally. Develop functional application design and specifications, as well as configure and support SAP APO modules, specifically APO DP, PPDS, SNP and GATP to meet business needs. Responsible for unit test applications, including customizations and interfaces. Guide users during testing activities and applications start-up activities. Facilitate the process of change by clarifying new procedures and training system users. Plan and establish after go-live activities including on-going application and support.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer S cience/Engineering or its foreign educational equivalent plus five years of experience as a SAP APO Analyst in the position offered or in a similar computer system analyst position with SAP
MARKETING ANALYTICS MANAGER – Chicago IL - Build ef-
ficient marketing campaigns & solutions. Perform customer profiling, segmentation & data mining to drive strategic decision making. Develop customer segmentation, targeting & testing strategies to drive incremental revenue & program performance. Design, develop & execute integrated marketing campaigns. Report on marketing program performance. Define key metrics (customer analytics, campaign ROI metrics). Optimize campaign mngt system & identify integration opportunities. Review current operational processes & recommend improv. Reqs BA/BS in Business, Computer Science or Marketing with analytical/technical oriented major plus 5 yrs exp in job or as Marketing Mngr, Operations Mngr, Marketing Consultant or similar. In lieu of BA/BS + 5 yrs exp will accept MS + 2 yrs. Exp must include: 2-5 years managing multi-channel, data-driven campaign segmentation including executing Unica Campaign and/or comparable campaign management solutions; 2+ years working with Relational Databases and structures; Demonstrated mastery of Structured Query Language (SQL).; CRM/ Campaign Management exp working in matrixed organization; campaign management data concepts such as contact and response disposition data. Will accept any suitable combo of education, training and experience to meet reqs. ASCP – American Society of Clinical Pathology, 33 W Monroe, Ste 1600, CHI, IL 60603. Apply through link- no calls at https:// home.eease.adp.com/ recruit/?id=15431051
ARE YOU A GREAT TEAM MEMBER? We want to talk with you!
Maintenance Tech Strong mechanical skills Can lift 60 pounds frequently Warehouse Office Manager Manage 2 shift office 3 – 5 years in a distribution office Warehouse Operations Manager Day-to-day motivation, supervision and performance of warehouse team 4 – 6 years experience Pre-employment drug test required. EOE. Send resumes to: careerscresthill @cloverleaf.com
ASSOCIATE STATISTICS MANAGER (Northbrook, IL) Astel-
las Pharma Global Development, Inc. seeks experienced statistician to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders across multiple products and therapeutic areas in the creation of research protocols and the assessment of clinical databases used to support Astellas products and disease areas. Must have Master’s degree in Statistics, Industrial Administration, or related field, and at least 3 years’ experience in statistical analysis and big data analytics. Interested applicants should mail a resume, referencing Job Code DE2016, to: Ryo Shirai, Astellas Pharma Global Development, Inc., 1 Astellas Way, Northbrook, IL 60062. Equal Opportunity Employer: M/F/D/V.
TECHNOLOGY IT STRATEGY & ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE SENIOR ASSOCIATE (MULT. POS.),
PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Help clients anticipate & address their most complex bus. challenges by providing mgmt, tech. & risk consulting services. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Info Sys Mgmt, Comp Sci, or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Info Sys Mgmt, Comp Sci, or rel. + 1 yr rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1005, Attn: HR SSC/ Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.
TECHNOLOGY Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc.
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
(dba Nokia) in Naperville, IL seeks Integration Engineer. Analyzes, designs, programs, debugs, & modifies sw enhancements and/or new prods used in local, networked, cloud-based or Internet-related comp progs. Position requires up to 20% travel, fully reimbursed by employer. Reqs incl. BS or foreign equiv in Mech Eng, Electrcs Eng, Electr’l Eng, CS or related + 5 yrs progressive exp. Mail resume to Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. (dba Nokia) , Attn: HR, 600 Mountain Ave.,6D401E, Murray Hill, NJ 07974. Please Include job code 75157 in reply. EOE.
CHICAGO ELECTRICIAN: ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR
is currently seeking Electrician for residential, commercial and new construction. OSHA-10 preferred. If you are interested in becoming part of a successful, fast paced company with competitive hourly wage, competitive benefits inclusive of holiday pay, vacation pay, pension plan, short term disability, long term disability, health benefits for employee and family, weekly paycheck! Please send your resume via email to resumes. electric01@gmail.com. Looking to hire ASAP. An Equal Opportunity Employer
Principal Support Engineer, Atoll MSEE & 1 yr in Eng role w presales and/or sales support & utilizng radio planning & optmztn software exp. Will also accept BS & 5 yrs prog resp exp as Eng w pre-sales &/or sales support & utilizng radio planning & optmztn software exp. Spanish required, travel 50% & must be able to travel internationally (Central America, North America, Europe) Nicolas Dubois at job_ us@forsk.com, Refer EE2, Forsk US Inc 200 South Wacker Drive, 31st Floor, Chicago, IL 60606
Financial Analyst in Stone Park, IL; analyze risk exposure & assess commercial loan performance. MS in finance or rel. fld + 1yr exp. Resume to: International Bank of Chicago, Attn: HR. Fax: 7737692686 or email mailto:a. nguyen@inbk.com
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 57
General
CAMPAIGN JOBS
NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN
Stores now hiring in Chicago for all locations...Earn $ while working with a team. Get paid while training. Jobs Available Now Midway/O’Hare Airports. Apply in person @ corp. office: 3830 N. Clark St. Chicago. 9am-10am Mon-Fri. Must bring ID’s and Social Security Card to apply.
LOGISTICS ANALYST: Suntrans in Itasca, IL seeks one w/ min BA,Analyzing product delivery or supply chain processes developing logistics support manuals. Send Resume to Suntran Int’l Inc. Attn: Kris Lim 1550 W Glenlake Ave Itasca, IL 60143 LLOYD AGENCIES OPENING NEW CHICAGO OFFICE 60 POSITIONS AVAILABLE MANAGERS, FIELD REPS AND OFFICE ADMIN. 847-496-7191 lloydagencies.com 4849 N. Milwaukee Ave. Suite 503 Chicago, IL 60630
REAL ESTATE
PARK! 7455 N . Greenview. Studios starting at $675 $695 including heat. It’s a newly remodeled vintage elevator building with on-site laundry, wood floors, new kitchens and baths, some units have balconies, etc. Application fee $40. No security deposit! For a showing please contact Samir 773627-4894 Hunter Properties 773477-7070 www.hunterprop.com
519 W. 103RD St. Lovely Studio
EDGEWATER!
CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188
ROGERS
1061 W. Rosemont. Studios starting at $695 to $725, All Utilities included! Elevator building! Close to CTA red line train, restaurants, shopping, blocks to the lakefront, beaches and bike trails, laundry onsite, remodeled, etc. For a showing please contact Jay 773835-1864 Hunter Properties, Inc. 773-477-7070 www.hunterprop.com
STUDIO $700-$899 EDGEWATER: Dlx Studio: full kic, new appl, DR, oak flrs, lndy, cats ok. $795/incl ht, water, gas, 773-743-4141 urbanequities.com
STUDIO $900 AND OVER
RENTALS
STUDIO $500-$599
12.25/HR FOR 90 DAYS THEN
15.00/HR APPLY NOW 872.203.9303
STUDIO $600-$699 CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms
Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. Start at $160/wk Call 773-493-3500
CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis. STUDIO $470/mo. Call 773-955-5106
HUGE 2 1/2 rm Ravenswood stu-
dio! 1 block to fabulous Winnemac Park! Closet to Metra, Brown Line, Mariano’s Grocery, LA Fitness! Hdwd flrs, Great closet space! 1952 W. Winnemac $970 ht incl. 1/2 MONTH FREE! (773) 381-0150 www.theschirmfirm.com
Hyde Park West Apts., 5325 S. Cottage Grove Ave., Renovated spacious apartments in landscaped gated community. Off street parking available. Studios $950, 1BR $1150 - Free Heat, 2BR $1400 - Free heat; 3BR Townhome $1775, 4BR Townhome, $2200 Call about our Special. Visit or call 773-324-0280, M-F: 9am-5pm or apply online- www.hydepark we st.com. Managed by Metroplex, Inc
STUDIO OTHER
Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg. 708-388-0170 SOUTH SHORE AREA Newly remod Studios. Near Metra & CTA, appls incl. $500-$525/mo. Steve 312-952-3901
apt. $400/mo. All utils furnished, seniors welcome. Residential area. 773-717-6092
LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT
near Loyola Park. 1339 W Estes. Hardwood floors. Heat included. Laundry in building. Cats OK. $695/ month. Available 11/1. 773-761-4318, www.lakefrontmgt.com
MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All
CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,
modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)
Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200
CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957
1 BR UNDER $700 QUALITY
APARTMENTS,
Great Prices! Studios-4BR, from $450. Newly rehabbed. Appliances included. Low Move-in Fees. Hardwood floors. Pangea - Chicago’s South, Southwest & West Neighborhoods. 312-985-0556
FALL SPECIAL: STUDIOS starting at $499 incls utilities. 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 3BR $699. With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. Call 312-4463333 7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-
bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park. Laundry & Security on Premises. Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030
LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888
WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA
ADULT SERVICES
ADULT SERVICES
CHICAGO: 67TH & Clyde 3BR apts hdwd floors, fpl, laundry facilities, $900; 77th & Bishop, 3BR apt, hdwd flrs, $900. Sec 8 Welc. (773) 429-0988 FALL SPECIAL $500 Toward
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
76TH & PHILLIPS 1BR $650$700; 2BR $750-$800. Remodeled, Appliances avail. Free Heat. Section 8 welcome. 312-286-5678 CHICAGO 1 BR, complete rehab, $575, utils not incl, section 8 welcome, 10810 S. Calumet Ave. 773-928-6244 or 773-206-3715.
CHICAGO - SOUTH SHORE Large 1BR, $660/mo. Free heat. Near Transportation. Section 8 Welcome. Call 708-932-4582
Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com
406 W. 119TH St. Large Unheated
Newly remod 1BR & Studios starting at $500. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat /hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204
BLUE ISLAND, completely remod 2BR. New appls., heated, lndry, prkg incl. $900/mo Sec dep req’d. 708-638-6687, 708-638-9742
SECTION 8 WELCOME 3BR. 77 Ridgeland $850. Heat incl, Laundry on site.
GALEWOOD 2.5BR, HARDWOOD floors, security cameras on
773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359
ADULT SERVICES
3BR apt, no pets, sec 8 Welcome $780/mo + 2 months security. 708-862-8285
property, near trans. $825/mo. Tenant pays utils. 773-882-2688
ADULT SERVICES
Ave) Nice, lrg 1 & 2BR w/balcony. 1BR $550, 2BR $650. Security deposit $650. Sec 8 Welcome. 773-9956950
1/2 MONTH FREE! LANDLORD
PAYS HEAT AND COOKING GAS! Extra large 2 1/2 rm Ravenswood studio! Only 1 block to Metra,Mariano’s Grocery, LA Fitness! Tons of closets! Built-in china cabinets! Onsite lndry/ storage. 4832 North Wolcott: $1,000.00 (773) 381-0150 www.theschirmfirm.com
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58 CHICAGO READER | OCTOBER 13, 2016
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CHATHAM 80TH & St.
ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL
Lawrence. Lrg studio $525, 1BR $585$630. 113th & Indiana, XL 1BR heat incl. $640. 773-660-9305
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 ∫
û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. PERRY. 1BR. $520/mo. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106
ONE OF THE BEST M & N MGMT, 1BR, 7727 Colfax ** 2 Lrg BR, 6754 Crandon ** 2 & 3BR, 2BA, 6216 Eberhart ** Completely rehabbed. You deserve the best ** 773-9478572 or 312-613-4427
1 BR $700-$799 NEAR DEVON & KEDZIE, Four large rooms, One bedroom. 1st floor, new paint, new carpet, Clean, quiet, Cultured area. Near shopping, transportation. No dogs. $795. Credit/background check. 773-441-5183 8001 S COLFAX; very lrg studio,
$600, 1BR $650, newly remod, hdwd floors, cable. Great location! Sec 8 welcome. 708-308-1509, 773-4933500
BURNHAM, 1 BR, balcony, wall to wall carpet, appl, heat, AC, laundry rm, $700 mo, 1 mo sec, credit check, 773-619-3587
8324 S INGLESIDE: 1BR, 1st flr, newly remod., lndry, hdwd flrs, cable. Sec 8 welcome.$660/mo. 708-308-1509 or 773-493-3500 ALSIP: LARGE 1BR w/balcony. $ 695/mo, appliances, laundry & storage. Call 708-268-3762
1 BR $800-$899 LAKESIDE TOWER, 910 W Lawrence. 1 bedrooms starting at $875-$925 include heat and gas, laundry in building. Great view! Close to CTA Red Line, bus, stores, restaurants, lake, etc. To schedule a showing please contact Celio 773-3961575, Hunter Properties 773-4777070, www.hunterprop.com OAK LAWN, SPACIOUS 1BR,
appliances, heat incl, close to Christ Hospital, $800/mo. 708-422-8801
1 BR $900-$1099 LARGE ONE BEDROOM apart-
ment near Loyola Park. 1341 W Estes. Hardwood floors. Heat included. Cats OK. Laundry in building. Available 11/ 1. $925/ month. Small one bedroom apartment available for $750/ month. 773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com
LARGE ONE BEDROOM apart-
ment near Red Line. 6822 N Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. Laundry in building. $900-$925/ month. Heat included. Available 11/1. 773-761-4318, www.lakefrontmgt.com
ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT
1/2 MONTH FREE! Fantastic 1
bdrm Ravenswood Garden apt- with loads of daylight! Hdwd flrs, formal Dining Room, remodeled Kitchen. Onsite lndry/storage. 5030 N. Winchester: Nov. 1. $1,025.00 ht incl. (773) 381-0150. www.theschirmfirm. com
WRIGLEYVILLE 4 1/2 rm, 1
bdrm: 4 blocks from Wrigley Field! Dec. Fireplace, 3 season porch! Lovely hdwd flrs, Big Kitchen/ pantry! On-site lndry/storage. Close to Jewel and EL! 1251 West Waveland: Oct. 1: $1,485.00 tenant heated. (773) 381-1050 1/2 MONTH FREE! www.theschirmfirm.com
WEST RIDGE, 6200N/ 2200W. Spacious updated one
bedroom garden apartment. Near transportation, shopping, parks. Heat, appliances, electricity, blinds included. 773-274-8792. $900.
1/2 MONTH FREE! Gorgeous Eng-
lish Tudor courtyard building! 2 blocks to Irving Park “EL”! Hdwd flrs, built-in bookshelves and china cabinets! Onsite lndry/storage. 4237 North Hermitage: $1,335.00 ht incl. (773) 381-0150.www.theschirmfirm. com
ADULT SERVICES
ADULT SERVICES
East balcony, new floors, updated bath Nov 1, Furnished $2300/unfurnished $1900
Try FREE: 773-867-1235 More Local Numbers: 1-800-926-6000
Ahora español Livelinks.com 18+
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 BELLWOOD 2BR, 1BA apt, encl porch, parking available, near transportation and shops. $825/mo. 773-849-5314
2BR+
NR
HARVEY 4BR, 2BA, LR, DR. $1075 FORD HEIGHTS 4BR, newly decorated. $850. Sec 8 Welcome. 708-672-0302 NR ARLINGTON / KEELER . 2BR Apt, $900 + Sec. Tenant pays all utils. Must have proof of income 708-846-1169
2 BR $1100-$1299 Evanston 1100sf 3BR, W/new Appl, oak floors $1275/mo incls heat. 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.co 73RD & DORCHESTER, 2BR, carpet, $1210; 119th & Calumet, 3BR, 2BA, carpet, $1350. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 ok. 773-684-1166.
lish Tudor courtyard building: only 2 blocks to Irving Park “EL”! Lovely hdwd flrs, built-in bookshelves! Onsite lndry/storage. 4235 1/2 North Hermitage: $1,195.00 ht incl. (773) 381-0150 www.theschirmfirm.com
2 BR UNDER $900 LOGAN
SQUARE 2 bedroom
apartment, 2-flat building, modern kitchen & bath, balcony, washer & dryer. $800/mo. Near Blue Line. 773-235-1066
CHICAGO, 80TH & PAXTON, 2BR, large apartment. Stove, fridge & heat included. $775/mo + security. Call 773-374-3194
APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN! OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $750.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000***
EAST CHICAGO, IN 2BR $675 heat incl; 3BR $650, tenant pays utils. 1 mo. free rent w/lease. Call MIKE 773-577-9361
APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. TIME TO TURN THE FURNANCE ON!!! Most units Include.. HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $495.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**
CHICAGO
CHICAGO, CHATHAM NO SECURITY DEPOSIT Spacious updated 1BR from $600 with great closet space. Incl: stove/fridge, hdwd flrs, blinds, heat & more!!! LIMITED INVENTORY ** Call (773) 271-7100 **
MUST SEE, LOW COST, CLEAN Calumet City, Quiet. XL 2 &3BR, 2ba, laundry, pkng, owner pays heat. $830 & $895. 312-3393517 JUMBO,
EXTRA LARGE 4.5 sunny rooms, remodeled, hwfl, 1-2 bedrooms. Two blocks Brown Line. Near Kennedy Expressway. $875 heat included. 773-710-3634.
FANTASTIC WRIGLEYVILLE 5
1/2 rm 2 bdrm! Avail Now! dec. fireplace, 3 season porch, formal Dining Room. Extra large remodeled Kitchen/pantry! On-site lndry/storage. 4 blocks from Wrigley Field! Close to Jewel & the “EL”. 1255 W. Waveland: $1,735.00, tnt heated. 1/2 MONTH FREE! (773) 381-0150. www.theschirmfirm.com
LARGE TWO BEDROOM, two
bathroom apartment, 3820 N Fremont. Near Wrigley Field. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Laundry in building. Available 11/1. $1695/ month. Parking available. $150/ month for single parking space. $250/ month for tandem parking space. 773-761-4318, w ww.lakefrontmgt.com
2 BR OTHER
EVANSTON 2BR, 1100SF, great kit, new appls, DR, oak flrs, lndry, $1250/mo incls heat. 773743-4141 www.urbanequities.co
CHICAGO, DELUXE, NEWLY DECORATED 2 & 3 BR, BY 71ST & UNION. FREE HEAT. $740-$840/MO. SECTION 8 WELC. MR. WILSON, 773491-6580
CHICAGO 10809 S.CALUMET.
Split level. Hardwood floors in Lv Rm & Dn Rm. Carpet in Bedrooms. AC & ceiling fans thru out. One Bdrm & Bath on 2nd Fl, One Bdrm & Bath in 3rd Fl with separate exit. Great for roommates. Pet friendly. Unit has its own furnace. Laundry & Storage room on 3rd Fl. Art Gallery on 1st fl. Electric, garbage, water & laundry facilities included. Rent $1,450/mo plus securities AVL immediately. Lease. Call Karly @ 574-806-1049
ADULT SERVICES
8204 S. Drexel. Lg 2 BR, liv rm, din rm. Heat, mini blinds, ceiling fan included. Sec. 8 OK. $985/mo. No Sec Dep. 312-915-0100 AFFORDABLE 2 & 3BRs FROM $650. Newly decorated, heated/ unheated. 1 Month Free for qualified tenants. CRS (312) 782-4041 FAR SOUTH CHICAGO -around 128th and Sangamon. Ranch Style 2BR, no basement. Please call: 312-720-1264 SUBURBS, 2-3 BR TH, 1.5BA, ceiling fans, newly remod BA & updtd kitchen, W/D hookups, patio, quiet area. Call 773-233-6673 CALUMET CITY CONDO for lease with option to buy, 2BR, 2BA. For details call 312-3426607, serious offers only.
LQQK! $950. NEWLY Rehabbed
CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ mo. w w w . p p k h o m e s . com;773-264-3005
PILSEN AREA - R E M O D ELED Large 2 Bdrm, 2 Bath
MATTESON, 2BR, $990$1050; 3BR, $1250-$1400. Move In Special is 1 Month’s Rent & $99 Sec Dep. Sect 8 Welc. 708-748-4169
3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200
Elmhurst: Sunny 1/BR, new appl, carpet, AC, Patio, $895/incl heat, parking. Call 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com
2 BR $1300-$1499
CHICAGO, ASHBURN AREA, 2 & 3BR, 1BA, HARDWOOD FLOORS, LAUNDRY ROOM, C /A, $875-$1050/MO. SECTION 8 WELCOME. 773-4300101 DOLTON: 2BR, ten pays all utils, new crpt & c-fans. $875 + $1300 sec & $25 credit check. Sect 8 welc. Smoke Free. 708-849-1152.
heated, decor FP, hdwd flrs, lots of storage, formal DR, intercom, newly remod kitchen & bath. $950. Missy 773-241-9139
ROYALTON HOTEL, Kitchen-
1/2 MONTH FREE! Stunning Eng-
OVER
83RD/JEFFREY,
ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597 ette $135 & up wk. Free WiFi. 1810 W. Jackson 312-226-4678
2 BR $1500 AND
AUSTIN -5519 W Monroe, 2BR, separate liv/din rm, fireplace, hdwds fridge & stove included, must pay own heat. 773-502-1579
MOVE IN SPECIAL B4 the N of this MO. & MOVE IN 4 $99.00 (773) 874-3400
1 BR OTHER
REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.
Modern kitchen & bath, 2 ca r garage. $1200 and up plus sec dep, Section 8 ok. 847-909-1538
CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. $500 gift certificate for Sec 8 tenants. 773-287-9999/312-446-3333
1 BR $1100 AND OVER 1660 N LASALLE, 1 bdrm, hi flr
COUNTRY CLUB HILLS. 4 BR,
CHICAGO 55TH & Halsted, male pref. Room for rent, share furnished apt, free utils, $365/mo. No security. 773-651-8824.
EDGEWATER 1000SF 1BR; new kit, sunny FDR, oak flrs, Onsite lndy; PKG Avail., $1095/incl heat. 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com
near Warren Park and Metra, 6802 N Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Heat included. Laundry in building. Cats OK. $900/ month. Available 11/1. 773761-4318, www.lakefrontmgt.com
2 & 3 Bdrms. Elev bldg, laundry, pkg. 6531 S. Lowe. Call Gina. 773-874-0100
71ST/HERMITAGE. 3BR. 77th/ Lowe. 2BR. 69th/Dante, 3BR. 71st/ Bennett. 2 & 3BR. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366
decor, hdwd flrs, stove, fridge, free heat & hot water, laundry facilities, Free Credit Check. 773-667-6477 or 312-802-7301
ROGERS PARK: Deluxe 2BR + den, new kitchen, FDR, oak floors close to beach. $1250/heated, 774-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com
NO SECURITY DEPOSIT No Move-in fee! No Dep! Sec 8 ok. 1,
CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large 2 room Studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $650-$975/mo. Call 773-233-4939
HYDE PARK 1BR. $975/MO + sec dep. Newly
WRIGLEVILLE 1BR, 1000SF, new kit/deck, FDR, oak flrs, Cent H eat/AC, prkg avail. $1295 + util, Pet friendly, 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com
CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 ***
7900 3A & 7906 3B S Wabash Lrg 2BR, 1BA, hrdwd flrs, free heat, remod. kitc., close to transp., prkg. $900/mo. $0 appl fee & 1/2 off 3rd mo rent. Pam Gore 312-208-1771
Large2BDR Apt. 1st Flr. 2 Flat Bldg. Newly renovated. Lg. Kitchen. Quiet Bldg. Hdwd floor & Ceramic Tiles. New bath. Lg. dining room. Near trans. SECTION 8 Welcome. 847-3313906
Apartment for RENT 3BR, 1BA. South Shore. 6900 block So. Cornell. Carpet BRs, Wood floor living room. 1 month Sec. Deposit. + 1 mo. Rent. Near public trans. Contact Ms. Beckley 773995-7209. CHICAGO, LARGE 3BR, f o r mal dining room, hardwood floors, ceiling fans, stained glass windows, heat included. $1050/mo. Call 773-2336673
L U X U R Y APARTMENTS,NEW CONS., 3BEDS 2BATHS, AIR TXT ONLY: 8478776855
Elegant & Spacious 4BR apt for rent, hardwood floors, nice block, picture windows $1100/ mo. 7706 S Paulina 312-5058737
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
CHICAGO, 1945 S. Drake, 2nd floor, 3BR, 2BA, newly renovated, hardwood floors, storage, no dogs, $1050/mo. Call 773-485-3042
ADULT SERVICES
ADULT SERVICES
RIVERDALE 3BR, 1.5BA Townhome, hdwd flrs, 1 car garage, near Metra & PACE, pets OK. $800/mo + sec. 708-539-8962
CHICAGO, 4019 W. Arlington, 3BR, 2nd flr, tenant pays all utilities, back porch,stove, $1075/mo. Price Neg. 773-966-4821 80TH & DREXEL, 3BR, 2BA, $1100. 79th & Aberdeen, 3BR. $950 +utils. Sect 8 ok. Both apts Hdwd flrs & ceramic tile. 773-502-4304
SOUTH SIDE - 7112 S EUCLID, renovated 3BR apt, hardwood flrs, $825/mo; 2BR $750. Call 773-285-3206 11748 S. BISHOP. 3BR, 2BA, full finished bsmt, 20x20 covered deck, 2.5 car gar, sect 8 welc. $1500 / mo. 708-889-9749 or 708-256-0742 CALUMET CITY, 3BR, 2 full BA, fully rehab w/gorgeous finishes w/ hdwd floors, appls incl., porch, Sec 8 OK. $1100/mo Call 510-735-7171
SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo. 708-288-4510 ROSEMOOR, 10344 S Green. beaut. rehab 3BR, 2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, fin bsmt, 2car gar, $1500/mo. 708-288-4510 BEAUTIFUL REHABBED 3BR, 2BA house, 11701 S Bishop, granite counters, SS appls, fin bsmt, 2 car gar, $1450/mo. 708-288-4510
3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 HARVEY 15307 ASHLAND.
3BR, 1.5BA, 2 story, unfin bsmt, fenced yard, no pets, tenant pays utils. Sec 8 OK $1200/mo. 773-956-7254
CHICAGO, 10320 S. UNION, Large 3BR, 2BA, kitchen, dining room & 2 extra bedrooms upstairs. $1355/mo. Section 8 welc. 773-419-8770
Dolton: Available November 1st. 3BR, brick beauty, C/A, fin. bsmt, quiet street, near schools/transp, 2 car gar, must see! $1350 + sec. 708-289-5178, call for appt 12358 S. Normal.3BR, 1.5BA. $1200/mo. Sec 8 Welcome. Move-in fee req’d. Immed Occup. 708-417-6999
SECT 8 OK, 2 story, 4br/2ba w/ bsmt. New decor, crpt & hdwds, ceiling fans, stove/fridge, $1465. 11243 S. Eggleston, 773-443-5397 2BR GARDEN, 3BR & 4BR, 2BA apts, (421 S. Homan. $1400/ mo)newly rehabbed, hdwd flrs, appls. 773-590-0101
3 BR OR MORE OTHER
7109 S. EMERALD AVE., 5BR, 2BA, brick house w/ full LR & DR, hdwd flrs, newly decorated, ten pays heat. Sect 8 welc. $1500/mo + 1 mo sec. 773-457-7963 S. SIDE: 5BR, 1.5BA, LR & DR, HDWD FLRS, HIGH CEILINGS, ENCL PORCH, PANTRY, BSMT, ADT ALARM. $1400/ MO. SEC 8 OK. 708-612-1732
ADULT SERVICES
1043 E. 80TH St.: 2BR $775
Large apartment, stove, fridge, heat included. Call 773.916.0039 or 312208-1771
CHICAGO, FAR SOUTH SIDE,
Newly decorated, 2BR Townhouse, $640/mo. Section 8 Welcome. 773-873-4321, 8am-5pm
7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333
Chicago, 8851 S. Muskegon, Recently decorated 2BR, stove & fridge included, $575/mo + security deposit. Call 773-374-8254
2 BR $900-$1099 BEAUTIFUL LARGE TWO bed-
room apts. 12603-11 S. Winchester Ave, Calumet Park, IL. Near Shopping and Transportation. $900/month. Call 773-568-1832 for appt. Come to Open House, Sunday 10/16/16 from 9am-Noon.
OCTOBER 13, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 59
SOUTH: MATTESON, COUNTRY CLUB HILLS, SAUK VILLAGE
2, & 4BR, House /Condo, Sect 8 ok. For info: 708-625-7355
NEWLY REHAB 98th & Yates, 3B R,$1200/ mo, 81st & Kenwood 3BR $1200/mo, 99th & Hoxie 3BR $1200/mo Sect 8 Welcome 312804-3638 CHICAGO, 6111 S. Normal 2BR apt, stove/refrig., 6101 S. Normal 4BR T/H apt, newly decor. Sec. 8 welc. Call 773-422-1878. SOUTH SHORE 4BR, 2BA House. Newly Remod. Appliances Included. 2 Levels, unfin bsmt. Pets OK. Section 8 OK. 312-371-4001
SOUTH SHORE Huge, Immac 3BR, 1BA, newly remod, private parking, near transport. Must See! Sec 8 welcome 312-770-0795 7229 S. MAY. 7BR, 2 Full Bath
House, hdwd flrs, ceramic tile. Fenced yard, no appls. 1 mo sec neg. Sec 8 Welc. 708-296-5477
RIVERDALE, 4 BEDROOMS, 1 Bath, finished basement, spacious home, $1250/mo. incl alarm system. Call 708-715-3169 NEWLY RENOV 5BR, 2BA
House, 8820 S. Yale. Sec 8 OK. A/C. Start at $1350/mo. 773-895-2867
CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent. Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. 312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812
GENERAL
RIVERDALE AVAIL NOW!
3 flat building, Large 3 BR, heat/gas free, stove & refrigerator incl. QUIET, gated, laundry, security, close to Metra, large rooms. 708-201-8126
FOR SALE 2 9-UNIT BUILDINGS, near Mid-
way, $600,000 each; 1 2-story building w/2 apts & 2 store fronts, W. 71st St.; $150,000; Lansing 24-unit building $1.2 million 773-925-0065
MATTESON, 3BR, 2.5BA, upgraded, granite cntr tops, fncd in bkyrd, close to park, rent but lease opt pref. Text, 708-3621268
non-residential SELF-STORAGE CENTERS. T W O locations to serve you. All
units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue. 773-685-6868. South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.
ADULT SERVICES
GOODS
TIRED OF BORING, unarousing
vegetables? Try SEXTABLES, the only vegetables GUARANTEED to be SEXUALLY AROUSING! Squash? We got it. Asparagus? Aspara-GOT it. Tomatoes? Trick question: those are fruit. Still sexy, though! At long last, have your vegetables and eat it (out) too! Sextables: The veggies you sex! www.EatSextables.com
UKRAINIAN MASSAGE. CALLS in/ out. Chicago and sub-
urbs. Hotels. 1234 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.
MUSIC & ARTS JAZZ IN THE SANCTUARY The Empress of Soul, TERISA GRIFFIN, performs 8-10pm Sat., Oct. 15 at ST. MARTIN’S CHURCH 5700 W. Midway Park, 60644. Tickets $40. Order at: JazzintheSanctuaryFeaturingTerisa Griffin, or 773 378-8111.
By Cecil Adams
BUTTERFAT STUDIOS, A pri-
vate tattoo shop in Logan Square, will be hosting an estate sale open to the public, on SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16, from 9:30am to 3pm. Come shop from a large collection of vintage, mid-century furniture, books, art, potted plants, and much more!
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
STRAIGHT DOPE Q : Are there really clowns abducting
NOTICES
people in North Carolina? —BRON
EDUCATION SLOWS INTERRACIAL. tinasmallroberttapedon. com
MULTI-FAMILY GARAGE SALE CHICAGO, 4814 N CENTRAL PARK, 3BR, large live & dining rm, newly reno w/ central air & all new appliances $1500 + utile, close to train. Call 7am-1pm 847-767-9326
@ 5931 N SACRAMENTO AVE. F & Sat 10/14-15, 9am-5pm & Sun 10/16, 1-5pm. Halloween Costumes, Exerc Equip, Bedrm Furn., Kitchen items, Toys, Books, Flowerpots.
roommates PULLMAN AREA, Newly remodeled 111th St., East of King Dr. $450-$550. Close to shopping & 1/4 block to metra. 773-468-1432
SOUTHSIDE - 55TH & Ashland, Clean Rooms, use of kitchen and bath. Available Now. Call 773-434-4046
ADULT SERVICES
60 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
legal notices NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-
European trained and certified therapists specializing in deep tissue, Swedish, and relaxation massage. Incalls. 773-552-7525. Lic. #227008861.
suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16148261 on September 28, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of LAW OFFICES OF SHARON SHI with the business located at: 500 N. MICHIGAN AVE., STE. 600, CHICAGO, IL 60611. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: XIAOMING SHI, 2152 N. LAKEWOOD AVE., CHICAGO, IL 60614, USA
ADULT SERVICES
ADULT SERVICES
MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and
-5224 S. WELLS--LOCATED
near all types of transp. This unit has 3 rooms with large closets, & a full bathroom, located min. from the Univ. of Chi 708-256-9323
MARKETPLACE
SLUG SIGNORINO
CHICAGO, 7617 S. Eggleston Newly Remodeled 5BR House, 2BA, finished basement, appliances included. Section 8 ok. 708539-6239
used. Large selection of professional high quality massage equipment at a very low price. Visit us at www. bestmassage.com or call us, 773764-6542.
HEALTH & WELLNESS FOR A HEALTHY mind and body.
A : When Georgia cops busted an 11-year-
old girl in September for bringing a knife to school, she protested that she needed the blade in case a clown tried to snatch her. Normally that excuse would seem far-fetched, but in 2016 you can get why the poor kid was spooked. For months police have been wading through report after report of suspicious characters in white face paint, floppy shoes, and the like, lurking, peeping, and accosting children. But not one evil clown has thus far spirited away his supposed prey; it may yet turn out that most or even all of these circus rejects don’t actually exist. The current panic began this August in South Carolina, with a claim that some clowns were offering money to lure children to a house in the woods, and spread quickly through Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, and North Carolina. Before long, phantom clowns were sighted north of the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania, and now it’s the rare state that hasn’t heard some account of clown activity. America has suffered such infestations before. Back in 1981, police around the country started hearing menacing-clown stories from kids, all ultimately unsubstantiated; similar waves crested in ’85 and ’91, with another mini outbreak occurring just two years ago. And we’re hardly the only nation affected: for a full month in 2013, the good people of Northampton, England, tracked the movements of a mysterious clown who turned out to be a local filmmaker; France suffered its own plague of sightings the following year. Fear of clowns—coulrophobia, as it’s come to be called—is seemingly so culturally deep-seated that some historians trace it back to the genesis of the modern clown itself. In her Smithsonian article “The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary,” Linda Rodriguez McRobbie notes that two 19th-century performers who established the contemporary clown’s costume were exceedinglyly troubled fellows. Joseph Grimaldi, a pioneer in the use of whiteface, was an alcoholic whose torments became infamous after Charles Dickens edited his memoirs into a best seller. And Pierrot, the French melancholy-clown archetype, was in large part the
creation of Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who once walloped an urchin to death with his cane. Crucial DNA for what’s now our stock image of the demented, murderous clown came from 70s serial killer John Wayne Gacy (you knew we’d get here eventually), who entertained at kids’ events in full clown regalia. Stephen King riffed off this conception in his 1986 novel It, and it was already a cliche by the time rap-rock goofballs Insane Clown Posse won their cult following. So, yes, clowns creep people out. That still doesn’t explain why they were more ubiquitous than Pokemon this past summer. Could it be that . . . people are big fat liars? Sure enough: a North Carolina man has already admitted that no, a clown hadn’t actually come a-rapping on his window one night, as he’d initially told police, and the inability of cops in other jurisdictions to scrape up even a trace of clown evidence suggests he’s not the only fibber. But the alleged sightings have apparently given people ideas: a crew of Alabama teens were arrested last month for impersonating clowns on Instagram and threatening to unleash violent mayhem on their school, and similar stunts have proliferated in recent weeks. What we seem to have here is a long-standing phenomenon given new oomph by social media. Every prank or hoax now hovers just a few gullible clicks from virality, with untold potential dupes and copycats alike waiting to pass it along. The credulous have been primed to believe themselves at constant risk from the most distant or mythical threats (terrorists being the old standby, but remember the “knockout game”?); trolls can smell this fear, and pounce accordingly. Really, though: Who’d don clown garb to steal a child anyway? Not to offer tips on abduction technique, but when your ends are nefarious, I’d figure conspicuously bright colors are a must to avoid. And kids are scared as hell of clowns. May as well try to lure a tot into your windowless Econoline with promises of broccoli and extra homework. 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
Could this be Savage Love’s biggest jerk ever?
Dan tears a 64-year-old a new one. Plus: more advice for the older set Q : I’m 64 years young, a
musician, chubby, full head of hair, no Viagra needed, no alcohol, I don’t mind if you drink, smoker, yes I am. I am also faithful, loyal, and single for five years. No health issues, nada, zero, zilch. Not gay, not prejudiced against gays, pro-woman, Democrat, MASCULINE. Except I only like the younger women and women without tattoos. And I like them FEMININE. Ladies my age are a shopping bag of issues with children and ex-hubbies. NO THANK YOU. So what’s my problem? Young women see me as an old gizzard. I am not ugly, and I look younger than 64. But I see what younger women go for. These girls are missing out on me because they would rather be abused, cheated on, and kicked around by some young prince. Be my guest, dear! Another problem is that I don’t go to bars or really go out at all, so how the hell am I going to meet a girl? But I long for a girl I can cherish. I’m even willing to marry the right girl if she wishes, no problema. Who cares about age? I sure don’t, but they sure do. Of course, I will die first; she can keep the car and everything else for that matter. I can’t take it with me. Am I asking for too much? —OBLIVIOUS LADIES DISREGARD ELDER ROMEO
A : Who cares about age?
You, OLDER, you care about age. You rule out dating women your own age and then toss out a couple bullshit rationalizations—kids, exes—for not staying in your actuarial lane. Come on, there are plenty of childless women out there in their 50s and 60s, OLDER, and everyone (yourself included) has exes. And excuse me, but women
your own age are a shopping bag of issues? You’re a shopping mall’s worth of issues yourself, OLDER. Issue number one: You can’t be honest, even in an anonymous forum, about why you wanna date younger women—they make your grizzled old dick hard— so you take a dump on all older women. Issue number two: male entitlement syndrome. (The universe doesn’t owe you a younger woman, OLDER; the universe doesn’t actually owe you shit.) Issues three, four, and five: an inability to spot your own hypocrisy, a clear preference for nursing a fantasy over accepting reality, and the probability that you’ve watched way too many movies with actresses in their 20s playing the romantic interests of actors in their 60s and 70s. If I may be blunt(er): You’re an older man, you’re a smoker, you’re out of shape, you don’t leave the house much, and, most fatally of all, you harbor resentment for the objects of your desire (“Be my guest, dear!”). Not even the prospect of inheriting a used car is going to land you a young woman. My advice, OLDER: If you want to be with a young woman once in a while, consider renting. But please don’t misconstrue anything I’ve written here as encouragement to date women your own age. They deserve better.
Q : I’m a 63-year-old man
engaged to a wonderful woman in her 50s, and our sex life is great. My issue: she loves to see huge loads. But I’m at an age where I produce hardly anything when I ejaculate. Is there a way to increase my production? We watch porn that has guys shooting seemingly endless streams and she gets crazy horny. I’d love to be able to
do the same! —NEED TO FILL THE GIRL
A : Hydrate more, NTFTG, and go longer between orgasms (days, weeks), and you might see a moderate increase in volume. But you’re never gonna blow loads like guys do in porn— porn producers, professional and amateur, select for big load blowers. What you’re doing now—enjoying your fiancee while not denying her the pleasure of watching her porn—is without a doubt your best course of action. Q : I’m a 56-year-old widow whose husband died suddenly eight years ago. I’ve learned how to get along on my own, but lately I’ve become lonely. The problem is that, since menopause hit, I no longer desire sex. For the most part, I’m fine with it—I really only miss cuddling and holding hands. (Sex with my late husband was truly terrible.) Should I just accept that I’m destined to spend the rest of my life alone? —READY TO GIVE UP
A : There are men out there
who aren’t interested in and/or capable of having sex anymore. Create a profile on OurTime.com or SeniorMatch.com and be honest about what you want (companionship, intimacy) and don’t want (sex). But I can’t help wondering if your terrible-at-sex husband didn’t create a negative association that a more considerate, attentive partner might be able to break. You just might find yourself wanting to reopen that door. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at thestranger.com. ß @fakedansavage
Get a side of jam with your lunch every weekday at noon with the Reader’s 12 O’Clock Track series on TheBleader.com. OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 61
Savoy Motel 11/5, 9 PM, Hideout Joan Shelley 12/3, 9 PM, Hideout Slander, Nghtmre 11/19-20, Concord Music Hall, 18+ The Sounds 11/20, 8 PM,
Metro, 18+
Wesley Stromberg 11/13, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b Marty Stuart & the Fabulous Superlatives 12/8, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/13, noon b Tedeschi Trucks Band 1/19-21, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Thu 10/13, 10 AM Toh Kay 12/3, 7:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/13, noon b Trails & Ways 11/3, 9 PM, Hideout Trentemoller 3/19, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 10/14, noon, 18+ Xibalba Itzaes 11/4, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+
UPDATED Philip Glass 11/3, 8 and 10 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, early show sold out, late show added, on sale Fri 10/14, 8 AM, sold out
UPCOMING
Seun Kuti o JOHANN SAUTY
NEW
AJR 3/4, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b American Wrestlers 12/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM Bi-2 Live 2/4, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Andrew Bird 12/14-16, 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM b Brave Combo 12/17, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 10/14, 11 AM Lee Brice, Justin Moore 1/14, 7 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM Circa Survive, Mewithoutyou, Turnover 2/11, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM b Cloud Nothings 2/10, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM, 18+ Coldplay 8/17, 7 PM, Soldier Field, on sale Sat 10/15, 10 AM Cut Copy (DJ set) 10/20, 10 PM, the Mid Davina & the Vagabonds 12/7, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/13, noon b Dru Hill 12/18, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM, 17+ Electric Citizen 11/5, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+
Alejandro Escovedo 1/26-28, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/13, noon b Fight Amp 11/5, 8 PM, Township, 18+ Flotsam & Jetsam 11/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Gaelic Storm 3/10-11, 9 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM, 17+ Gangstagrass 12/15, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 10/14, noon Ghostface Killah 10/20, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Kevin Griffin 1/20-21, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/13, noon b Here Come the Mummies 2/18, 8:30 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM, 17+ Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 11/25, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 10/14, 8 AM b Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge 2/26, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 10/14, 8 AM b Cate Le Bon & Tim Presley 2/4, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 10/14, noon Gurf Morlix 11/2, 8 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 10/14, 11 AM NRBQ 10/24, 7 PM, Hideout, on sale Fri 10/14, 10 AM Post Malone 10/21, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+
62 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 13, 2016
All Get Out 10/29, 10 PM, Schubas, 18+ American Football 10/29, 7:30 PM, The Vic b Amorphis, Swallow the Sun 3/26, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Anderson Wakeman Rabin 11/5, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Asking Alexandria, Born of Osiris, I See Stars 11/1, 4:30 PM, House of Blues b Atmosphere, Brother Ali 11/21-22, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Bad Suns, Coin 10/28, 7 PM, Double Door b Band of Horses 11/16, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys 10/29, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Bouncing Souls 11/17-18, 7 PM, Double Door Kane Brown, Jordan Rager 12/17, 8 PM, House of Blues b Cage the Elephant, Catfish & the Bottlemen 12/2, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom Citizen 10/20, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Clutch, Zakk Sabbath 10/25, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Omar Coleman 10/24, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston Elvis Costello & the Imposters 10/29, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre CRX 11/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Andra Day 11/18, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+
b Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early
Dickies, Queers 11/17, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Diiv, Moon King 11/10, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ FIDLAR 11/17, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Frankie Cosmos 10/26, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Freaky Deaky with Disclosure, DJ Snake, Tiesto, DJ Khaled, and more 10/28-30, Toyota Park, Bridgeview Frigs 11/30, 9 PM, Hideout The Good Life 11/11, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Gza 10/30-31, 8 PM, City Winery b Hands Like Houses, Our Last Night 12/4, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Helen Money 12/9, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Griffin House 10/26, 8 PM, City Winery b Frank Iero & the Patience 11/19, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b In Flames, Hellyeah 11/30, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Jesu, Sun Kil Moon 11/13, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Khemmis 1/13, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Kiiara 11/14, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b King Dude 12/17, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen The King Khan & BBQ Show 12/3, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Tory Lanez 11/23, 7 PM, the Vic b Lany 11/3, 7:30 PM, Metro b Macabre 12/23, 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Machine Gun Kelly 11/16, 7 PM, House of Blues b Magic Dick & Shun Ng 10/30, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Magik*Magik 11/13, 6:30 PM, Schubas b Majid Jordan 11/6, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Kawabata Makoto & Tatsuya Nakatani 11/29, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Mana 10/22, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Sarah Potenza 11/12, 9 PM, Hideout Pretty Reckless 11/11, 7 PM, House of Blues b John Prine 11/4, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Progtoberfest with Carl Palmer, Brand X, Security Project, and more 10/21-23, 7 PM, Reggie’s Pwr Bttm 10/26, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Queensryche 12/9, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+
ALL AGES
WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK
EARLY WARNINGS
CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME
F
Screaming Females 11/2, 9 PM, Subterranean Screeching Weasel 11/4, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b Uniform 11/12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Vamps, Citizen Zero 11/15, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Sander Van Doorn 12/24, 10 PM, the Mid Foy Vance 10/28, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Vanic 11/6, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Phil Vassar 10/23-24, 8 PM, City Winery b Vektor, Black Fast 11/5, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Liz Vice 11/30, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston VNV Nation 10/23, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Watsky 11/2, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b Wax Tailor 1/26, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Weekend Nachos 1/13-14, 7 PM, Subterranean b Weepies 11/2, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Weezer, Phantogram 12/1, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom Bob Weir 10/20, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre b Wet 10/26, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Weyes Blood 10/31, 9 PM, Hideout Xylouris White 12/3, 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen John Paul White 11/15, 5 PM, Lincoln Hall White Lung 10/27, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Jenny Owen Youngs 10/21, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+
SOLD OUT Bear vs. Shark 10/29, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Bongripper 10/29, 9 PM, Hideout Failure 10/21, 9 PM, Double Door, 17+ Lukas Graham 1/17, 7 PM, House of Blues b Highly Suspect 11/18, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge b Jason Isbell 11/19, 7 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn and 11/18, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall Marshmello 11/25-27, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Mr. T Experience, Nobodys 12/9, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 17+ Conor Oberst 11/26, 8:30 PM; 11/27, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Pup, Meat Wave 11/12, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Pup 11/12, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Tegan & Sara 10/21, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Timeflies 11/4, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Tricky 10/30, 7 PM, Double Door v
GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene THIS YEAR Anuj Girdhar, aka Chicago producer Del Dot, founded electronic label Deep Space Objects. On Saturday, October 15, the label releases its third cassette, Beta Orionis, the second in an ongoing compilation series inspired by constellations. The 15 tracks on Beta Orionis include music from Del Dot, Japanese footwork whiz Foodman, and 90s Chicago ghetto-house producer Jana Rush. At 3 PM on Saturday, Deep Space Objects hosts a release party at Saki with OB, Jon Monteverde, Jeremiah Fisher, Del Dot, and Lily (formerly Ultrademon). In 2010 DJ and Argot label head Steve Mizek got a CD-R of 90s house tracks from little-known Chicago producer John Kardaras, who’d made them in a duo with Chris Ike called Shifty Science. Mizek recently revisited that interstellar, serenely funky music, and on Saturday, October 15, Argot drops two Shifty Science releases: the 14-track digital comp Lab Work 91-96 and the 12-inch Versions for Modern Dancefloors, which collects four remixes by Argot partners Mizek and Savile. Since launching seven years ago, local rock ’n’ roll clothier Straight to Hell has diversified from motorcycle jackets into denim, T-shirts, and varsity and souvenir jackets. On Thursday, October 13, Straight to Hell throws a free birthday bash at East Room with Baltimore mutants Ravagers, New York garage band Dirty Fences, locals Mama, and a White Mystery DJ set. Whether you knew Lord Mantis drummer Bill Bumgardner from his bands— which also included Indian and Burning Churches—or from his jobs at the Flat Iron, the Empty Bottle, and elsewhere, you probably liked him. He was so sweet and generous that pretty much everybody who met him did! For that reason and many more, Gossip Wolf is gutted by Bumgardner’s death at age 35—bandmate Will Lindsay confirms that he passed on Sunday, October 9, and bandmate Ken Sorceron says it was suicide. Rest in peace, friend. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.
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BEN RECTOR
THE BIGGEST TOUR I HAVE DONE SO FAR TOUR FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21
JOHN PRINE
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4
AMOS LEE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28
ST. PAUL AND THE BROKEN BONES TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1
CRAIG FERGUSON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6
THE FRAY
WITH SPECIAL GUEST AMERICAN AUTHORS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11
GET ACCESS TO
CHASE PREFERRED
SEATING
AVAILABLE TO CHASE CREDIT AND DEBIT CARDMEMBERS.
For more info, visit Ticketmaster.com or
chase.com/chicagotheatre
M A RQ U EE PA R T N ER O F T H E C H I CAGO T H E AT R E ®
The Chicago Theatre provides disabled accommodations and sells tickets to disabled individuals through our Disabled Services department, which may be reached at 888-609-7599 any weekday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Debit cards are provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC Credit cards are issued by Chase Bank USA, N.A. © 2015 JPMorgan Chase & Co.
OCTOBER 13, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 63
CHICAGO,
SINCE 1988. ©2016 Goose Island Beer Co., Chicago, IL | Enjoy responsibly.
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