Chicago Reader print issue of October 17, 2024 (Vol. 54, No. 3) by Chicago Reader

THIS WEEK

Staﬀ note A spell from the Reader’s resident

05 Street View Styles at Threaded Stories

06 Feature Visit the kitchen witches at sober cafe Loaves & Witches.

07 Reader Bites Roo op honey from Kaiser Tiger

& POLITICS

08 Feature The Mazdaznan cult’s Chicago legacy 10 Chicago history A lone grave and other bodies in odd places

14 Proﬁle Obscura and House of Whoreors’s dark and sexy cholo-goth burlesque

COMMENTARY

16 Isaacs | On Culture Haunting and historic Graceland Cemetery is part of CAC’s Open House weekend. ARTS & CULTURE

18 Cra Work Inside Av Grannan’s playfully macabre accessory line

22 Q&A U of C’s J K Chukwu on the art of horror writing

23 Books Author Eden Robins humanizes AI in Remember You Will Die.

SPECIAL FEATURE

20 Renken | Map The Reader’s guide to metaphysical shops in Chicagoland

24 Reid | Feature Scholar Kay Daly talks about witches onstage.

26 Plays of Note An Act of God Becky Nurse of Salem, Que Te Vaya Bien, and more

28 Feature Fear of revolution o en underpins Chicago-based horror ﬁlms.

29 Moviegoer Movie love

30 Movies of Note The Silent Hour thoughtfully explores disability, and Terriﬁer 3 doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

31 Ludwig | Feature Jinx Dawson speaks on the legacy of Coven.

34 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Souled American, Erica Dawn Lyle, the Heart Trio, and Poison Ruïn

38 Gossip Wolf Animal Records gives Evanston a vinyl shop for regular folks, the Great Lakes Dungeon Siege hosts a satellite party in Chicago, and more.

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CHEMA SKANDAL! FOR CHICAGO READER

BREAK CYCLES TO BUILD FUTURES

Get ready for Tue 11/5

The next election in the City of Chicago allows you to vote on statewide referendums, county positions, judges, school board members, and of course, the president. Go to the URL chicagoelections.gov for polling place information.

Referen-wha?

Statewide, Illinois voters will find three advisory referendum questions to answer on the November 5 ballot. These were placed on the ballot in May after a vote by the Illinois General Assembly. These questions are advisory and nonbinding, so no laws will be enacted based on the answers. However, the results can help lawmakers gauge public opinion. You’ll be asked to vote Yes or No to the following:

The Election Worker Protection Referendum

“Should any candidate appearing on the Illinois ballot for federal, State, or local office be subject to civil penalties if the candidate interferes or attempts to interfere with an election worker’s official duties?”

The Property Tax Relief and Fairness Referendum

“Should the Illinois Constitution be amended to create an additional 3% tax on income greater than $1,000,000 for the purpose of dedicating funds raised to property tax relief?”

The Assisted Reproductive Health Referendum

“Should all medically appropriate assisted reproductive treatments, including, but not limited to, in vitro fertilization, be covered by any health insurance plan in Illinois that provides coverage for pregnancy benefits, without limitation on the number of treatments?” v

STAFF NOTE

It’s serendipitous that our Occult Issue is out on the same day as the full moon. As you know, we always publish on Thursdays so we didn’t plan it that way. Whether through magic or pure luck, you’re likely holding this paper during one of the most energetically charged times of the month.

October’s full moon is known to many as the Hunter’s Moon. If you catch it in the sky, the moon will look larger and redder (a celestial event known as a “red supermoon”) compared to more typical full moons. It’s a good time to take stock of what you’ve been cultivating this year and look ahead to what you want to accomplish in the next few months.

The occult covers many topics: witchcraft, ghosts, aliens, heavy metal music, and actual, you know, cults. Occult is also a word often used to describe things that are outside Judeo-Christian beliefs and values, though Judaism and Christianity certainly have their own kinds of magic.

For instance, many insist tarot is derived from the Torah and was used to study the text in secret during times of persecution, although others refute that claim. To some, Buddhism is occult, whereas to others, Catholicism’s ritual consummation of the blood and body of Christ feels pretty witchy. To me, the occult has always been that which lingers in the shadows, that which is sort of indescribable but undoubtedly recognizable as a little dark, a little out there, or a little strange.

Our Occult Issue has a little bit of all of that. We cover magic in Chicago, music that brings out the demonic in us, theater that explores witches on stage, and more, just in time for spooky season. If you’re looking to embrace your inner witch, ﬂip to the center spread and tear out our map of metaphysical stores in Chicagoland. Choose a shop to visit and, while you’re there, pick up supplies (although many of you may already have some of these items)

Find us on socials: facebook.com/chicagoreader twitter.com/Chicago_Reader instagram.com/chicago_reader threads.net/@chicago_reader linkedin.com search chicago-reader

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

to give this little spell a try.

“Chicago is Joy,” a full-moon spell for Chicago Reader readers

You will need:

*A form of currency (pennies work best)

*A yellow candle (white also works in a pinch)

*A pen or pencil

*A piece of paper

*A stick of cinnamon

(cauldrons big or small

*A firesafe container (cauldrons big or small are great and bonfires are even better but anything you can safely burn a piece of paper in is ﬁne)

While this spell works best on the full moon, I’m a firm believer that spells come to us when we need them most, so cast at your convenience.

Under the light of the full moon, light one end of the cinnamon stick and wave it around you and your workspace in a clockwise circle. Not only does this smell great, it also brings in abundance and protects you while you’re working your magic.

Next, place the currency under your candle. If you’re using a small spell candle, place it in some kind of holder and then put the currency under that. (We don’t want your candle falling over!) Light the candle.

Next, take a moment to write down a list of things that bring you joy. Maybe that’s your favorite breakfast sandwich at the coffee shop down the street or that wonderful moment when the el arrives right as you step

onto the train platform. Next to this, write another list of things you want to bring into your life: a new job, more time with friends, closing on a house, acceptance into your dream school, etc.

Take this piece of paper and fold it towards you three times. Hold it to your chest and visualize the things that bring you joy fueling that which you hope to attract. Every smile brings you closer to your goals.

Now, light the piece of paper with the ﬂame from the candle and drop it into the ﬁresafe container. Please be careful. It may help to rip the paper and feed it to the fire piece by piece. If you can’t light the paper, burying it somewhere will work just as well.

After the candle has burned down, place the coin somewhere you see often. If you have an altar or a place you pray, that’s a great place for it. Whenever you look at the coin, smile and know that your joy is bringing the abundance you desire. Blessings! v

—Charli Renken, social media engagement associate and self-proclaimed Reader resident witch m crenken@chicagoreader.com

CHEMA SKANDAL! FOR CHICAGO READER

CITY LIFE

STREET VIEW

Fashion future and present

Local designers take the runway at two exciting Chicago Fashion Week events.

By ISA GIALLORENZO

“Something volcanic is happening here, something is bubbling up in the ground. . . . There’s energy, vitality, intensity, and potency in Chicago right now,” said Tommy Walton, who served as master of ceremonies at Threaded Stories, a runway show presented at the Woman’s Club of Evanston as part of this month’s Chicago Fashion Week festivities. “I think Chicago gives you an opportunity to learn your craft and get a grip on who you are as a designer,” Walton

continued. “It has this unbelievable creative atmosphere and community.”

After a hiatus of almost ten years, the upgraded iteration of our local fashion week has finally arrived, opening October 9 with the runway event A Celebration of Chicago Style, hosted at the Chicago Cultural Center. A Celebration, organized by the Curio and sponsored by luxury travel agency Abercrombie & Kent, featured renowned designers from multiple generations. The runway included work from

the legendary Barbara Bates (who wowed the audience with her colorful leather creations), local favorite Maria Pinto and her luxurious high-tech textiles, and sportswear couturier to the stars Sheila Rashid.

Throughout October, Chicago Fashion Week features many facets of our growing fashion industry in events and exhibitions as diverse as Chicago itself.

The Threaded Stories show was sponsored by Cloth + Home, a North Shore boutique owned by Pam Kendall and Linda Johnston, and featured nine independent local designers. It was produced by Anna Hovet, former executive director of the Chicago Fashion Incubator.

“The [intention] for this show was to showcase the designs and tell the artists’ stories . . . help the audience look past the aesthetics and into the lives of the makers,” explained Hovet. “By reflecting on the craftsmanship and in-

spiration behind the clothing, we are able to transport the audience back to a time when garments were coveted and specially made.”

The event felt transported from another era, intimately set in a historic ballroom and theatrically hosted by a sequined-from-head-to-toe Walton, a delightful and favorite personality in Chicago’s fashion scene.

There were many impressive moments on the runway, but the highlight was a collection presented by Andrea Reynders, a professor emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and cofounder of the We Are Material designer collective. Her designs give the wearer freedom to move, in versatile styles that can be worn by different body types in multiple ways. Reynders’s creations point to the future of womens wear, where comfort and elegance are not exclusive and one size ﬁts many. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Le to right: a pink look from Barbara Bates, LaShawn Trammel of Back 2 Back Vintage (top), photographer and stylist Anne Bocharova (bottom), designer Chiara Mangiameli and young friend, a design by Andrea Reynders on the runway BATES PHOTO BY ALEX CALLEJO; REYNDERS PHOTO BY JIGNA MANIAR; ALL OTHER PHOTOS BY ISA GIALLORENZO

FEATURE

6034 N. Broadway, Tue–Thu 6: 30 AM– 6 PM, Fri 6: 30 AM–10 PM, Sat 7 AM–10 PM, Sun 7 AM– 4 PM, closed Mon, 630 -338 - 5634, loavesandwitches.com

Visit the kitchen witches at Loaves & Witches

The late-night Edgewater cafe caters to spiritual, sober, and queer communities, but everyone is welcome.

By LORENA BALLY

For anyone who wishes that spooky season could last year-round, just head to Edgewater, where Loaves & Witches is open late. The cafe serves up magical pastries and co ee alongside weekly tarot readings in a whimsigothic atmosphere. There, co-owners Julia Goodmann (she/they) and Lisa Harriman (she/they) welcome all uncanny Chicagoans with open arms: curious witches, lactoseintolerant vegans, sober night owls, the LGBTQ+ community, and beyond.

“We don’t want to just talk about being a ‘come as you are’ space, but put that fully into action,” Harriman says. “We want not only our customers, but our staff, our little coven, to be fully themselves. This is a safe space to just absolutely exemplify who you are inside and out.”

When entering Loaves & Witches, it’s hard not to be hypnotized by the floating candle lights, jewel-toned couches, tables topped with tarot decks, and black walls decorated with tattoo ﬂash pages and ethereal prints. Harriman and Goodmann both have per-

sonal spiritual practices: Harriman refers to herself as “an astro rock witch,” while Goodmann embraces earth reverence. Their spiritual practices bleed over into the way they run the cafe.

“Over the years, we’ve gotten together to sort of celebrate di erent holidays and have spiritual knowledge gatherings, and we would bake things and bring things together. That deﬁnitely is woven into the fabric of the cafe,” Harriman says. “Baking and creating food and nurturing and nourishing community is so much a part of our individual practices too, that this just folds right in.”

The two friends are undoubtedly also kitchen witches. Harriman started by baking unconventional treats for friends like Goodmann, who is vegan. Even the most gluten-free and vegan treat–averse people ﬁnd themselves enchanted by the Hexe Your Ex Co ee Cake and pumpkin-topped Cheezecake, which wash down well with potions like the cinnamon-molasses-tinged Coven Cold Brew.

“We get to be inclusive to a lot of di erent

communities who don’t otherwise get to go to a co ee shop and enjoy a pastry,” Goodmann says. “So many people have celiac and Crohn’s and lactose intolerance, that they can’t just sit down and enjoy a cheesecake or enjoy a mufﬁn. Here it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, baby doll, we got ten di erent options for you.’”

Inclusivity is key for Harriman and Goodmann, who refer to themselves as sober addicts. They solidified their friendship and love of baking amongst a supportive queer sober community. Their main goal is to o er a low-key nighttime space for sober Chicagoans to spend time with friends, go on dates, or see what nightlife looks like outside the bar or club scene.

“We know a very vast queer sober community that has really been craving a space to go, to not have the pressures of alcohol or any other substances around, but be able to be completely comfortable, knowing that it’s not even an option,” Goodmann says.

Like all good witches, Goodmann and Harriman care deeply about protecting the energy

m letters@chicagoreader.com R LOAVES & WITCHES

of the space and their sta , who they refer to as their coven. Members of the coven get to contribute o erings to a community altar that sits behind the scenes, safe from customers’ eyes. Goodmann and Harriman do weekly energetic cleanses of the space and tarot decks to ensure the cafe stays safe for anyone who enters. They are also passionate about paying their coven living wages.

“I used to manage a corporate co ee place for years and absolutely loved my job, but was not making a living wage,” Goodmann says. “I believe that you should be able to make a living doing whatever it is that you’d like to do. If that is baking, being a barista, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to pay rent in our opinion, especially in the city, where coffee shops are a high commodity, and people want them and use them as a third space.”

Loaves & Witches, which opened in late June of this year, is embracing their first spooky season by cohosting a Halloween Bash. The party starts at fellow LGBTQ+-owned business Rad Pop! Vintage Emporium, on October 26 from 2-6 PM, then moves to Loaves & Witches for the nighttime festivities from 6-10 PM. It’s just one of many programs they want to craft for the witchy, queer, sober community.

“There’s going to be costume contests. There’s pumpkin-gut wrestling, karaoke— we’re just excited for this little party,” Harriman says. “Having a growing community and having more service, more outreach, more opportunities for people to have a safe space and inclusive space [is the goal]. The fun and tangible side is trivia night, bingo, open mike, doing readings—things like that will be available here.”

Both owners feel largely embraced by the community. On Tarot Tuesdays, hosted by local practitioners like Pharaoh & Tarot and Black Fairy Mystic, tables are constantly occupied during their pay-what-you-can sessions. The duo is excited to introduce their ﬁrst trivia night on October 25 and a Witches Clinic on November 8, and they’re excited to see what else they can cook up for the community in the coming years.

“The most heartwarming thing is how many times a day we have neighbors come up to us in the cafe and say, ‘Thank you. We needed this space,’” Goodmann says. “Making it homey, warm, [and] welcoming is something Edgewater has been craving. This is our community, and that’s how we’re going to treat everyone here.” v

Photos of the staﬀ, aka the coven, at Loaves & Witches; cafe co-owners Lisa Harriman (L) and Julia Goodmann LOAVES & WITCHES

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.

Early last summer, when the Randolph Street lindens were bursting with clusters of tiny yellow-white blossoms, Callie Roach’s honeybees went crazy.

Roach is the general manager at Fulton Market’s Kaiser Tiger, and when the restaurant installed five colonies—via the Hive Supply Company—on its rooftop earlier in the spring, she became the head

beekeeper too. When the lindens started flowering, the mellifluent bacchanal in the apiary above eclipsed the perpetual sausage party in the beer garden below.

Tilia americana is the only native linden of some 30 species worldwide, and once you recognize its heart-shaped leaves, you’ll start seeing them all over the city—particularly up and down Randolph’s restaurant row. But the linden’s delicate, mildly spicy honey is prized all over the world.

Roach says the hives, under the royal

FOOD & DRINK

authority of their monarchs—tentatively named BB Queen, Lady B Johnson, Bea Arthur, Barbee, and Beeoncé— produced some 110 pounds of excess raw ambrosia over the season, some of which is used in the kitchen and some at KT’s sister restaurant, Max & Issy’s, for their hot honey pepper pizza.

It’s also been bottled for sale in the restaurant and from its resident Good Things Vending machine for $8 for 2.5 ounces. With an assist from some later-season locust trees and clover, it has a light, lemonade color, with

a slight milky opacity. It’s gently flavored too, with a pleasant whisper of bitterness and a minty finish.

And that’s just the start. Over the season, Kaiser Tiger’s colonies grew from about ten thousand individual bees to more than 60,000, a good number of which should survive the winter to produce a more generous harvest next year. —MIKE SULA KAISER TIGER 1415 W. Randolph, $8 for 2.5 ounces, 312-2433100, kaisertiger.com v

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

Kaiser Tiger roo op honey

FEATURE

Mazdaznan’s enlightened grifter

In late-1800s Chicago, a charismatic eccentric built a religious cult following.

By MICCO CAPORALE

The first time Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish caught significant press attention was in 1904, when Emma Reusse—or Eloise, as she was sometimes called—was seen running from his temple shrieking and pulling out her hair. She was committed to an Elgin sanitarium after the guru and self-described doctor had advised her to juice fast for 40 days to spiritually and physically “perfect” herself. Two weeks later, she died.

Since coming to Chicago around 1900, Hanish had been preaching the gospel of Mazdaznan: a religion he’d developed based on the Zoroastrian tradition of sun worship padded with elements of Christianity and various elements of Eastern mysticism. He claimed physical and spiritual health were one and the same, and he was proof: a senior citizen who looked half his age thanks to ritual fasting, meditation, vegetarianism, yoga, breath work, and sun baths. In the religion’s most sacred text, Inner Studies, he detailed the secrets to his immaculately preserved physique and more, including a permissive attitude toward homosexuality and a belief that men and women are equal and should share power. For turn-of-the-century Chicagoans looking for anything from novelty to empowerment, there was a lot to ﬁnd appealing.

Mazdaznan was frequently described as an anarchist religion, not only for some of its more progressive attitudes but also for its hostility toward the state. Women held high-ranking positions in the faith, and time was set aside for women to discuss and organize around issues a ecting them at every winter Gahanbar, seasonal festivals which Hanish sometimes called “peace conferences.” During his sermon at the 1907 Gahanbar, he said the solution to society’s ills was absolute freedom from laws. “The more law, the more corruption,” he preached. “The more government, the more injustice.” At Mazdaznan’s

peak around 1908, he attracted some 18,000 followers worldwide, especially society women. This allowed him to outfit a lavish temple in Bronzeville; drive one of the fastest, most expensive cars in the city; and evade most investigations into his operations. Reusse wasn’t the first woman to starve herself sick at Hanish’s encouragement. A year or two before, a warrant had been issued for Hanish in Denver because he’d advised a woman to fast on flaxseed tea. She wound up in a mental asylum. Soon, one of his high priestesses in Lowell, Massachusetts, was fined for the same reason. People noticed other questionable things, too: he’d buy items from the ten-cent store, then repackage and sell them at much higher prices as goods from “the East.” Hanish insisted that, if a law got in your way, you should find a way around it. For example, to avoid a tari on jewelry, “Dip it and bring it in as a fake.” Don’t want to pay a duty on silk? Weave a cotton border around it to remove after it’s been imported. Contrary to other faiths that promoted humility and simplicity, Mazdaznans did not aspire to asceticism— true physical and spiritual mastery would open practitioners’ worlds for indulgence. All it took was total control.

Hanish was haunted by minor legal troubles and rumors about his operation for years, something he was able to minimize as persecution. History shows all new and unusual ideas are met with hostility. Remember what happened to Jesus? Plus, there was some evidence he was unfairly maligned. Wealthy men were regularly outraged when their wives left them to become Mazdaznans, so they labeled the faith obscene. Reporters, too, had an obsession that bordered on jealousy with Hanish’s e ect on women. In a Tribune article, one even went so far as to observe Hanish giving out 450 kisses to 75 followers in a single day, most of whom were “the prettiest women ever

seen in Lowell.”

Simultaneously, they described him as too womanly and “lacking in the pronounced masculine tastes,” as one Chicago Inter Ocean article stated. He “delights in crocheting and artistic needlework . . . and even advises male followers to do likewise in order to acquire ‘sympathetic harmony with the gentler forces of nature.’ . . . As vain as any girlish beauty, he changes his raiment many times daily and boasts that the flowing and somewhat feminine robes which he wears so gracefully are designed by himself.” Hanish also cooked and cleaned “daintily” and moved with “airy, fairy gestures.” To many, this guy was super gay—but also stealing their women.

The threads began to unravel in 1911 when Hanish shepherded Elizabeth and William “Billy” Lindsay, the wife and 12-year-old son of a late construction magnate in Philadelphia. Billy had a trust worth $500,000, which would go to his mother if he died, and Billy’s aunt and uncle had reason to believe Hanish was trying to make that happen. They hired a private detective agency to locate the boy, who was discovered at the Chicago temple severely malnourished from a diet of white

people, who were encouraged to donate and participate liberally but kept at arm’s length if they asked too many questions; and an inner

There’d been almost a dozen deaths by starvation or suicide associated with Mazdaznan. However, the list of people who’d been made sick from “treatments” was seemingly endless.

grapes and beer. The aunt and uncle filed for custody, but Billy and his mother ﬂed the state. Even in their absence, the custody trial commenced, and it put Hanish and his faith in the hot seat.

By the end of the ﬁrst week, much fanfare had been made about the eccentricities of the faith, but there was also a lot of insight into the group’s organization and failings. One witness testiﬁed there were three classes of followers: an outer edge of sincere believers, usually middle- to low-income people, who were of little interest to Hanish; wealthy

circle, who were either infatuated with Hanish or knew too much and were kept quiet with inner-circle privileges. Supposedly, everyone in the inner circle was very, very rich, though it’s unclear how much they ﬁnancially beneﬁted from the cult. There’d been almost a dozen deaths by starvation or suicide associated with Mazdaznan. However, the list of people who’d been made sick from “treatments” was seemingly endless.

One pamphlet promised high monetary rewards for joining followed by extensive fees. Earlier in 1911, the church had begun soliciting

members for 40 cents per month plus ten names and addresses of people who also might be interested in joining. At that time, it had some 15,000 members. This netted the temple around $6,000 per month on top of the $100 to $1,000 people paid for treatments from Hanish and fees accrued from books like Inner Studies , which Hanish printed himself and sold for $10 to $50 depending on how much money he assumed someone had. He would also charge people $50 to $100 for weekly luncheons and banquets that included lectures on topics like “breath culture.” Donation envelopes circulated, and coins were forbidden.

Since the trial was focused on whether or not the temple was a suitable environment for a young boy, nothing came of airing these secrets. However, Inner Studies became an object of great interest, and during the trial, a federal agent was able to trick Hanish into mailing a copy across state lines in violation of the Comstock Act. Hanish faced an obscenity trial, in

which the district attorney called Inner Studies “the product of a depraved and licentious mind,” and newspapers refused to print anything that even hinted at its contents. Of particular o ense to the prosecution was chapter two: a long celebration of colonics. In one part, it describes constipation as a cause of uncontrollable horniness that must be cured with a colonic.

During the trial, Hanish’s father, Richard Hanisch, was found in Milwaukee. He testiﬁed that his son was a 36-year-old German immigrant who grew up in Illinois, not a 68-year-old Persian raised by Brahmin noblemen. He ran away to Salt Lake City as a young teenager, where he worked as a sheepherder and delivery boy. Eventually, he was hired as a typesetter at a Mormon newspaper, but he left to follow a Mormon defector intent on starting his own religion. They had a falling out, and Hanish began piecing together parts of various occult texts and Eastern philosophies to develop Mazdaznan. Several cities and name changes later, he landed in Chicago with a magic show promoter as his right-hand man and began his ascent as an enlightened grifter. Hanish lost the obscenity trial. He was sentenced to six months in jail and a fine of $2,500. That was enough of a blow for him to sell the temple and leave Chicago in 1913, relocating to Los Angeles by 1916. Over the years, several attempts were made to connect him with inappropriate behavior with children, especially young boys, but nothing came of it. It’s hard to gauge how much of this was homophobic paranoia. The most substantive charge came in 1940, four years after his death, when a woman alleged a high-ranking church o cial raped her at Hanish’s encouragement when she was 11. Though likely true, she lost the trial. In the end, preoccupations with Hanish as a “sex neurotic” preaching a “philosophy of lust,” as one attorney put it, seemed to distract from his obvious threats: being a fake healer and capitalist scammer who preyed on people’s vanity and exoticism. v

Newspaper clippings including a Los Angeles Times image of Gilman Beeler, “doctor of Mazdaznan” COLLAGE BY SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

OCCULT

CHICAGO HISTORY

Scrapyard dead

Chicago’s human remains don’t always end up in expected places.

By PAUL DAILING

Art BY ANNA WAGNER

“That it?” I ask, stepping through the metal scrapyard on Chicago’s east side. An employee in a gray hoodie nods.

It’s a hot, bright October day, the sun beating down on spandex-clad cyclists as they whip past industrial sites north to the Lakefront Trail or south to the rebuilt Calumet Fisheries. Gulls swoop through crystal skies overhead, and the nearby 95th Street Bridge lifts and dings as sailboat masts slide silently down the Calumet River.

In the middle of the scrapyard, among recycling wreckage and construction equipment, I stand by a grave.

IN MEMORIAM ANDREAS VON ZIRNGIBL

BORN MAR. 30, 1797

DIED AUG. 21, 1855

A VETERAN OF 1816

BATTLE OF WATERLOO

Shielded from machinery by six massive concrete blocks, with a few large tankards of nonpotable water serving as bumpers, it’s the one-armed, Napoleon-ﬁghting Bavarian ﬁsherman’s sixth or seventh grave marker over the years. His great-great-grandson Mark Zirngibl, 79, keeps an earlier marker made of wood in his garage in Cedar Grove, Wisconsin. “That’s kind of a chuckle. Freaks people out a little bit,” Zirngibl says, laughing.

The solo cemetery is clean, trim, and weedless on the day Sims Metal Management allows me to visit. “Mr. von Zirngibl’s gravesite has been located among an active metal recycling facility for decades,” explains George Malamis, the company’s director of operations. “Sims Metal took ownership in 2008 and has continued to respectfully maintain and honor his ﬁnal resting place.”

The bridges ding and the gulls swoop, and I think about how unfair the weather is to this story. Hunts for the occult shouldn’t need sunblock.

As the atheist classic Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! taught the generations, ghosts aren’t real. “Ghost” is a name we give the sadness

that comes when someone we weren’t done with has gone. They don’t haunt castles, moors, or dingy passages. They’re creatures of time, not space. Ghosts haunt the moment when you half reach for your phone, thinking of a text message only they would appreciate, and vanish in a flick of pain when you remember why there’d be no reply.

Bodies, though, are real. And Chicago is

museums, and churches where the dead live unexpectedly. People have died in Chicago for 12,000 or more years—some honored, some cast aside, and some, like the scrapyard grave of Andreas von Zirngibl, stubbornly refusing to be forgotten.

A body some believe belongs to Chicago’s ﬁrst murder victim, Fort Dearborn interpreter Jean Lalime, is in an o -site Chicago History Museum (CHM) storage location. The Goodman Theatre plays Yorick with a skull from a Skokie medical supply house that iO cofounder Charna Halpern passed off as belonging to comedy legend Del Close. The Vatican, in 1929, provided South Chicago’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church with two bone fragments believed to belong to St. Jude the Apostle for the National Shrine of St. Jude, a bridge and four blocks away from von Zirngibl.

mies purchased as souvenirs on steamboat trips to Egypt, and medically unique bodies that otherwise would have gone to paupers’ graves. The Field Museum is the resting place of more than four thousand people, with remains ranging from single-toe bones from group burial sites to mummies and Tibetan skull drums put on display. The International Museum of Surgical Science, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, the Gri n Museum of Science and Industry, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum all either have or had remains on exhibit or on-site, according to a guide the Chicago Rabbinical Council put together to help Orthodox Kohanim avoid the dead while playing tourist. There are an estimated 12,000 corpses under Lincoln Park, the unaccounted bodies that

chockablock full.

I’m not talking about the cemeteries, which dapple Cook County from Acacia Park to Zion Lutheran. I mean the oddballs: the scrapyards, storage spaces, parks, galleries, theaters,

Chicago’s museums are massive, often reluctant graveyards, with modern repatriation departments still dealing with the legacy of an era when collectors ﬁlled exhibit halls with Indigenous bones plucked as tchotchkes, mum-

were supposedly moved out of the park when it was the old city cemetery but that never seemed to arrive at new ones. The Couch Tomb mausoleum in the Chicago History Museum’s backyard is one of the more visible ones, but

let’s not discount the 82 bodies turned up when the CHM dug a parking garage in 1998 or the co n under the big barn at the Farm in the Zoo, turned up in 1962 but reburied when no one at City Hall told the builders what to do with it.

Some of the corpses you’ve picnicked on could have been the result of shoddy recordkeeping or workers taking the path of least resistance when moving the bodies. Others may have been intentional, if we can trust an anecdote that real estate developer W.D. Kerfoot told the Chicago Tribune in 1897 about a German immigrant who resisted moving his children’s bodies from the park to Graceland Cemetery. “‘Why,’ he said to me, ‘why will I do that? Nein. Out in Graceland I have just one little grave for my children and here I have a great big park.’”

The oldest human remains uncovered within Chicago’s city limits were turned up in 1904 when the Budlong Pickle Company, in what’s now Lincoln Square, dug a new gravel pit in the massive ﬂower and cucumber ﬁelds it billed as the “World’s Largest Pickle Farm.” Accounts from the time described an eight-thousandyear-old burial mound containing 14 bodies arranged in a circle, feet inward, that decomposed down to skeletons the moment they were exposed to the air. “I usually take the details provided with a large grain of salt,” a representative of the Illinois State Archeological Survey cautions me. The site is now under the pavement on Foster Avenue between Swedish Hospital and the Hilltop Family Restaurant. The bodies’ locations are unknown, either turned to knicknacks by private collectors or quietly disposed of for the greater good of operating a pickle farm.

For much of the city’s history, there was no Reservoir Salvage Act, no National Historic Preservation Act. There was no National Environmental Policy Act requiring a federal review process for developments and digs, nor a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act providing a collaborative pathway for museums and tribes to return bodies

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plucked apart for souvenirs and exhibits. That disregard for Indigenous bodies is part of von Zirngibl’s story as well. “Apparently there were also Native American graves in that area too, and those have been completely forgotten, as far as I know,” Mark Zirngibl says. “Nobody talks about those guys.”

A“Apparently there were also Native American graves in that area too, and those have been completely forgotten, as far as I know. Nobody talks about those guys.”

ndreas von Zirngibl moved to Chicago from Bavaria in July 1854, according to family legend, due to rumblings of war. Andreas had previously served in the Bavarian army, by some accounts losing his arm in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815—the current marker lists an incorrect year for the battle. Chicago o ered the fisherman’s family peace and rivers. He settled on the north side, then moved to Whiting, Indiana, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, in late

1854 to be closer to his trade. Soon, he needed a site closer to water. “The boats required for carrying and casting a seine are very heavy, and the one-armed man and his boys found great di culty in beaching their boat and carrying it far enough up onto the shore to be safe from the north-east storms of early spring, and he sought to ﬁnd a place where they might row into a harbor and tie the boat, without being obliged to drag it from the water for safety. Such a place appeared at the mouth of the Calumet river,” Illinois Supreme Court justice David Baker wrote in the 1894 ruling that perpetually locked von Zirngibl on industrial property, legally consecrating this graveyard for one.

By the family’s version of events, recorded in that ruling, Andreas bought the land in what was then the community of Ainsworth in the spring of 1855 for $160 in gold from an unknown seller in a deal brokered through a local named “Dutch Charley.” Von Zirngibl never moved his family there; it was just a site for Andreas and his sons, Franz, 16, Jacob, 14, and George, 12, to tie up their boat after ﬁshing

in Lake Michigan, although they built a shack on the property and slept there frequently. The one-armed ﬁsherman died that summer, buried on the site with a marker reading in German, “Here rests in God the Lord the wellborn Andreas Zirngibl, born March 30, 1797, died August 21, 1855.”

A year later, his widow, Monika, brought the family from Whiting to Chicago, leaving the Calumet River land in the care of a hunter named “Irish Frank” Degnan. In the early 1870s, Degnan asked Franz Zirngibl if some “good Dutch friends” of his could build there. Before long, several families had homes on the site. “Although paying no money these various ‘tenants’ made a sort of tribute to these appellants as landlords, by giving Franz and George, when they went out there, ﬁsh, fowl and dairy products,” the state Supreme Court continued. A handshake deal paid in chickens was appropriate for the near-worthless swampland left to them by their father when he ﬁrst bought the property. But by the 1880s, that land was no longer worthless. The Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company was grabbing up land

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continued from p. 11

throughout the area, pushing the property’s value to $1 million, or about $34.5 million in today’s money. The uno cial communities were deemed squatters and tossed from the site.

A lawyer ﬁghting the land grabs out of, in his own words, “a feeling of personal antagonism to the said Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company,” started tracking down people with possible legal claims on property along the Calumet River. He convinced the Zirngibls to sue the company in 1887.

The suit made its way to the Illinois Supreme Court, but there was one problem: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had destroyed the records proving Andreas’s purchase, the family claimed. The company called him a squatter, claims repeated by newspapers covering the case. Canal company lawyers pointed out that neither the family nor Irish Frank had paid taxes on the site in 32 years. They consulted three separate ﬁrms’ surviving tract indexes, none of which recorded any sale. They cast doubt that George Zirngibl, who was 12 at the time of the alleged sale, could recall legal proceedings with such crystal clarity three decades years later. The court concluded, “although not without a considerable degree of hesitation,” that Andreas probably had received the deed but never took it to be recorded.

family unfettered access. “The one thing that they couldn’t dispute was the fact that he was buried there,” Mark Zirngibl says.

And that’s how it’s been for 130 years. The land has passed from industrial tenant to industrial tenant. Grave markers have come and gone a half dozen times. The older wooden ones rotted away or landed in descendants’ garages. Stone markers have been destroyed by construction equipment over the decades.

A previous tenant fundraised a marble monument from its employees after a crane mishap in 1999. The East Side Historical Society, now the Southeast Chicago Historical Society, raised the funds for the one before that, in 1987. “The society just picked up the ball when nobody else did,” Sellers says.

Art Design Chicago platforms local perspectives and histories through diverse exhibitions and events

“The one thing that they couldn’t dispute was the fact that he was buried there.”

Landmark designation is theoretically possible, but no one has pursued it. “Landmarks sta has no record of any formal public suggestions to landmark this location, though the idea has come up in the past,” says Chicago Department of Planning and Development deputy commissioner Peter Strazzabosco. But von Zirngibl’s case would still have to be made. The physical structure is a stone put up in 1999 to replace one from 1987. The resident is famous only for being dead where he shouldn’t be. “It’s unclear under what criteria it would qualify for a potential designation,” Strazzabosco says.

He didn’t file the paperwork, so his family got nothing. The evictions and development continued. Today, the Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company’s first president, James H. Bowen, is known as “The Father of South Chicago.”

“You can kind of read it two ways,” says Rod Sellers of the Southeast Chicago Historical Society. “One is Big Business trying to take advantage of a little guy, or a very astute smalltime guy whose family, after he had passed, tried to get over on the company.”

The family got one carve-out. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled the canal and dock company had to keep the gravesite and allow the

As for Andreas von Zirngibl, the “wellborn” Bavarian ﬁsherman called war hero and squatter, he continues to rest among scrap and concrete. His grave is weeded by recycling center employees. His visitors are journalists and ghost hounds looking for Halloween prose. Like Jean Lalime, St. Jude the Apostle, whoever donated their skull to science and ended up being passed off as Del Close, and the bodies under Lincoln Park and the World’s Largest Pickle Farm, Andreas von Zirngibl is one of Chicago’s ghosts, phantoms of time not space, haunting the periphery to remind us who we were. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

The

sprawling arts initiative

features dozens of

free

and low-cost

exhibits and programs throughout the city and suburbs

Chicago artists and designers are on the vanguard of the visual arts world and make an impact that reverberates far and wide. But in a sprawling metropolis with a large, diverse population, it can be challenging for creatives and independent art institutions to connect with one another and engage with art lovers throughout the greater community.

Art Design Chicago seeks to spark and foster those relationships while celebrating the past, present, and future of local art. The current phase of the initiative was launched in September 2023 by the Terra Foundation for American Art in partnership with local artists and arts institutions. It champions exploration and storytelling through a series of events and exhibitions in more than 75 arts and culture spaces throughout Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. By the time it concludes in January 2025, it will have helped platform the work of hundreds of local artists.

The goal of the initiative is to shed light on various aspects of the city’s art and design history and contemporary creative life from diverse perspectives. To do so, they provide grants and other resources to partners large and small, including long-standing institutions like the Newberry Library and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), community hubs such as the American Indian Center and the South Asia Institute, neighborhood-based, artistrun organizations such as the Narrow Bridge Arts Club and the Greystone Collective, and others. Collectively, the exhibitions oﬀer a glimpse into the rich communities and wealth of talent that help shape the pulse of the city.

The Terra Foundation believes that art is for everyone and strives to make the local arts scene more equitable and accessible for all. The majority of the exhibitions are free to attend (some may charge a small fee). They also partner with youthcentric organizations such as My Block My Hood My City and Project Osmosis to help nurture the next generation of Chicago artists and leaders.

With its variety of new and ongoing exhibits, Art Design Chicago has something to oﬀer for arts lovers or any age or interest. Through December 14, the Center for Native Futures (56 W. Adams, suite 102) presents Gagizhibaajiwan, a curated exhibition featuring the work of four Anishinaabe artists: interdisciplinary artist Marcella Ernest, sculptor Michael Belmore, weaver Renee Wasson Dillard, and painter Zoey Wood-Salomon. In September, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (800 S. Halsted) launched Radical Cra , a free exhibition and workshop series celebrating the work of immigrant artists and educators who believed that art could be a tool for social reform. Also in September, the Smart Museum (5550 S. Greenwood) kicked oﬀ its 50th anniversary with Give the Drummer Some!, a multipart, pattern-based installation and public art project by south-side artist Robert Earl Paige.

As we head deeper into fall and the holiday season, there’s no time like the present to immerse oneself in local art, culture, and history. Learn more about Art Design Chicago and where to ﬁnd its many current and upcoming exhibitions at artdesignchicago.org

This sponsored content is paid for by the Terra Foundation

Photo by Lynn Renee Persin

Dancers of the dark

Bast Entertainment and House of Whoreors celebrate Obscura’s third year of dark and sexy cholo-goth burlesque at Simone’s Bar.

By KACIE FAITH KRESS

In the back of Simone’s Bar on 18th Street in Pilsen, beyond cozy booths and rustic wood, a red velvet curtain seals off the private area and conceals a hidden bacchanal.

The relatively small brick and chalkboard room, complete with its own full bar and restrooms, is dim save for red, pink, and purple spotlights, with small ﬂashing lasers. Faux spiderwebs hang low over the booths, and hightop tables are all gathered around the room’s emptied center, a makeshift stage. Gothic EDM-rock blares while jarringly cut clips of horror movies play on a projected screen. A dark metal chandelier is tangled thickly with webs that glow hot pink in the darkness. The crowd is abuzz with chatter and anticipation of the show: queer, goth burlesque.

The show opens with the haunting strains of “Ptolemaea,” a song by popular trans, alternative artist Ethel Cain. Two women in white

silk shifts and veils, throats smeared with fake blood and eyes hidden behind milkywhite contacts, creep out barefoot, holding votives. They dance as sensual, eerie mirrors to each other, slowly stripping until nothing but G-strings and glittering nipple covers remain.

One of those women is Sio Bast, 38, producer and founder of Obscura, an LGBTQ+ cholo-goth burlesque group. Bast founded Obscura as part of her production company, Bast Entertainment, in March of 2021. After a career as a professional salsa and Latin dancer, she stepped into burlesque seeking the same artistic freedom, inclusive environment, and sense of empower-

ment that her performers now enjoy.

“A lot of the goth scene here in Chicago is mostly white people,” Sio Bast said, noting that Obscura is the only Latin burlesque company in the city. “I always had these feelings like I didn’t belong there—and if I don’t belong in this place that was created for people who don’t belong, there’s something wrong with that. I want to see more people of color, queer folks, and goth parties, so I’m going to book them and highlight them. These are people who deserve to be awarded and celebrated.”

The other woman performing with Bast is Morteisha Addams, 31, who cofounded House of Whoreors—a new horror-themed burlesque and drag production house— with her wife and fellow performer, Harley Go’Lightly, 35. This October 10 event, named Hexes, is a collaboration between the two organizations, celebrating the anniversary of Obscura’s third year performing at Simone’s. These regular performances are produced by entertainment company Kombi.

invited. Each performer then took the stage. Lady Ginger, 54, danced in intricate, glittering black lingerie reminiscent of Gothic-era architecture, with a ﬂoor-length black lace veil. Though this was her first performance with Obscura, Ginger has been doing burlesque for almost 20 years. As someone with a degree and background in theater, she loves the particular freedom burlesque gives her to act as her own costumer, choreographer, writer, and producer.

“I’m creating this piece entirely out of my heart, my brain, and my soul. It can be anything that I want it to be. It can be everything that I want it to be.”

Bast, Addams, and Go’Lightly opened Hexes with ground rules on consent—namely, audience members not touching performers unless

“I’m creating this piece entirely out of my heart, my brain, and my soul,” Ginger said. “It can be anything that I want it to be. It can be everything that I want it to be.”

Between performances, Bast and Addams had the audience answer trivia questions to win tickets to House of Whoreors’s next event, welcoming cash tips into their thongs and bras as they walked around. They spoke about the warm, loving community burlesque has given them and thanked everyone for attending. Off-duty performer Cola Coquette and her wife, Kim, swept in to gather performers’ discarded clothing and cash tips.

Vivi Valens, 42, a longtime Obscura performer, ﬁrst danced in a serpentine outﬁt be-

Morteisha Addams (le ) and Sio Bast BRITTANY SOWACKE FOR CHICAGO

OCCULT

fore changing into a jack-o’-lantern costume, incorporating elements of salsa dance as she stripped down to nearly nothing and tossed candy into the cheering audience.

“There’s this sensual empowerment to burlesque, too,” she said, “where you’re really encouraged to express yourself and have ownership over your body and your sexuality. You’re able to share very intimate components with a public that wants it. It’s an electric feeling.”

Sunny Haelstorm, 32, began her two performances sinisterly robed, even her face concealed. She teased the audience, removing layers in transfixing synchronicity with the thrumming electronic music. At times, she dropped to the floor, performing acrobatic movements.

“I love the atmosphere Sio creates here,” Haelstorm said. “There is no cholo-goth burlesque anywhere else. I love any music that is darker and more moody. It just speaks to my soul.”

Obscura and House of Whoreors’s goth, macabre themes aren’t something many other burlesque shows boast. At Obscura’s second anniversary event last October, one performer, Miss Ammunition, knelt before a table and slid two sterile needles through the flesh of each of her temples. Bleeding as she danced, Miss Ammunition proceeded to twirl batons of ﬁre and extinguish the ﬂames by eating them.

“It’s a vehicle for people to step out of their comfort zone, but it’s also a very welcoming space for people who are interested in fringe arts in general,” Valens said.

The groups’ celebration of all things taboo, dark, alternative, and “weird” also serves as an ode to the repressed and othered— reflecting their missions of inclusion and representation.

“We all have the same goal, that’s just bringing underrepresented communities to the forefront and celebrating the fact that alternative, goth subcultures are not homogenous at all,” said Go’Lightly, noting that she rarely sees butch bodies like her own represented, and that her wife, Addams, had felt the same way about Black alternative performers. “There are fat bodies and Black bodies and POC bodies, and there is a place for everybody.”

For marginalized individuals, the chance to bare oneself (in the case of burlesque, literally), to celebrate oneself and be celebrated in turn, is profound.

“Burlesque: it’s theatrical, it’s comedic, it can be very emotional, and it’s so, so vulnerable. I was repressed my whole life, and I can ﬁnally as an adult have the freedom to do what I want,” Bast said. “Burlesque changes people’s lives.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

POETRY CORNER

Miquiztli and Sabedoria

Allow me to be excavated, Let my pedigree Be dissected And placed on tables. Let my bones be spread And have them theorize Over the size of my elbows. Maybe I’ll be mummiﬁed; Pulled from a bog Or found in a cavern, Screaming for eternityLet them ﬁnd my pots and pans, And childhood toys.

Let them construct a story, And publish their ﬁndings In articles that will never be read.

Or maybe I’ll pass into cold and silence; A hummingbird Lost to time.

Mother Earth redeeming My body.

And I’ll exist nevermore. Or maybe my ﬂower and song Will be hummed for generations. My ancestors will dance, Through word and breath And than be forgotten; Renamed as a car model Probably a Jeep or Chevy, Maybe even a Ford.

By Juan Gerardo Chavez

Juan Gerardo Chavez-Trujillo is a Mexican poet from Durango, Mexico. At the age of two, he was brought to the United States and was raised on the south west side of Chicago. His inﬂuences include Cesar Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and Seamus Heaney.

Poem curated by Casey Cereceda. Cereceda is an educator and musician living in Chicago, IL. Originally from South Florida, he ﬁnds inspiration from his childhood. A recurring theme in his work is identity, and how his has been shaped by places of origin and formative experiences related to ethnicity, masculinity, and spirituality.

Fall Hours

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM

Good Dress Book Launch

Join us for a poetry reading featuring Good Dress author and VS podcast co-host Brittany Rogers, followed by a conversation with Kush Thompson. November 2, 2024 at 2 PM

Zip! Staged Reading

Join us for a staged reading of Timothy David Rey’s play, directed by Roger Ellis. November 7, 2024 at 6 PM

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

Morteisha Addams and Sio Bast (le photo); Lady Ginger BRITTANY SOWACKE FOR CHICAGO READER

A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

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ON CULTURE

Dead Chicago

Haunting and historic Graceland Cemetery is part of CAC’s Open House weekend.

By DEANNA ISAACS

There’s some famously scary stuff at Graceland Cemetery, most notably Lorado Taft’s hulking bronze statue, Eternal Silence. It’s been spooking cemetery visitors since it was erected there in 1909, in part because of its grim reaper shrouding and in part because word got around that if you looked directly into its eyes (hard to do since it’s ten feet tall and stands on a pedestal), you’d see your own death.

Eternal Silence was the second stop on the Chicago Architecture Center walking tour of Graceland that I took last week, led by veteran CAC guide Sylvia Dunbeck. She noted that this piece of art—probably the most famous in the cemetery and sibling to Taft’s monumental Fountain of Time sculpture in Washington Park—marks the grave of, ahem, Dexter Graves and the whole Graves family.

Dunbeck, who combines the crowd-herding authority of your fourth-grade teacher with the deadpan chops of a stand-up comic, has been doing this tour since the 1980s. In this treasure trove of Chicago history that is also an arboretum and a 121-acre gallery of memorial art and architecture, she’s not particularly focused on the hocus-pocus. But, you know, it’s a cemetery. Faced with nature’s actual agenda, the supernatural’s not much of a stretch. One of the last stops on the two-hour walk was the grave of Inez Clarke (aka Inez Briggs), the glass-box girl. She died in 1880 from diphtheria, but legend blames a lightning strike. During thunderstorms, her statue (by Andrew Gagel) is said to vanish from its glass cage.

The tour paused at the graves of more than 30 Chicagoans, including some, like early Chicago settler John Kinzie, who’d been booted

from the original City Cemetery when its land was acquired for Lincoln Park. (Kinzie, who died in 1828, actually rose from his grave twice: he’d originally been buried at Fort Dearborn.)

Founded in 1860 and designed by O.C. Simonds and other landscape luminaries, Graceland was part of a movement for “garden cemeteries.” Breaking the mold of cluttered, urban, and usually sectarian burial grounds, it was nondenominational from the start and meant to function as a park for public use as well as a ﬁnal resting place.

the burial ground for 1909 Plan of Chicago mastermind Daniel Burnham; paid respects at the rock that marks the grave of Auditorium Theatre designer Louis Sullivan; and stopped at the plain black slab that marks the resting place of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. We visited too many other architects to mention, along with Chicago icons like baseball greats Ernie Banks and Minnie Miñoso, dancer Ruth Page, and detective Allan Pinkerton.

One thing we didn’t explore on that tour but that you can easily ﬁnd on your own is the 2.5-acre prairie that was created beginning in 2014 along the CTA Red Line tracks on the southeastern boundary of the cemetery. The great-grandparents of Chicago writer René Ostberg are buried in this area, and their modest markers were until recently eclipsed by this eco project. Ostberg has written and posted a searing piece about it; you can ﬁnd it at reneostberg.medium.com.

And if you walk just a little north of the Field plot and look to your right, you can spot the graves of Dr. Christopher Manuel, who died in 2005, and his mother, Linda, who passed two years later. Their family headstone is topped by the lithe bronze statue of a boy with a ﬂute (by Italian artist Rinaldo Bigi) and engraved with lyrics from the 1934 jazz standard “For All We Know.” If it doesn’t pop into your head, there are classic renditions online. “For all we know / This may only be a dream / We come and go / Like ripples on a stream. . . . ” Never mind the horror-show myths: this is truly haunting.

It attracted the captains of industry: among the many we saw were the towering column-topped tomb of railcar tycoon George Pullman; the lakeside Mini-Me Parthenon that holds the twin sarcophagi of Palmer House founder Potter Palmer and his wife, Bertha; and the expansive Field family plot where, as Dunbeck noted, Marshall Field lies, ﬂanked by his ﬁrst wife and his longtime mistress (who, OK, eventually became his second wife).

Graceland also attracted so many architects that it’s known as “the cemetery of architects.” We walked onto the little island that’s

Graceland Cemetery is one of more than 170 venues participating this weekend in the Chicago Architecture Center’s annual free Open House Chicago event. CAC will be hosting a family-oriented pre–Day of the Dead workshop at Graceland on Saturday, October 19, 10 AM to 1 PM, in partnership with the National Museum of Mexican Art. Because of Open House Chicago, there’s no CAC docent-guided Graceland tour this weekend, but visitors can do essentially the same walk on their own, using the cemetery’s free annotated map and the mobile phone audio. And if you can’t make it this weekend, no worries. There’s a CAC tour scheduled for October 27 at 1:30 PM. Also check out tours o ered by Adam Selzer, author of the 2022 history and handbook Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols, and Secrets. Graceland is open to the public every day, always free; check gracelandcemetery.org for hours. v

m disaacs@chicagoreader.com

Sculpture on Christopher Manuel’s headstone at Graceland Cemetery

DEANNA ISAACS

CRAFT WORK

The magically macabre world of Sublime Remains

Av Grannan’s accessory line takes inspiration from roadkill.

By CHARLIE KOLODZIEJ

Afew years ago I was at the 21c Museum Hotel for the ﬁrst of their annual Fashion’s Night Out event, which celebrates up-and-coming designers in Chicago’s fashion scene. I was there helping a friend set up a display for their new line, but once that was done, I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I wandered around the gallery, dodging fashionistas left and right, until I was stopped— nay, ﬂoored!—by something I saw across the hall. I carefully picked my way across the crowded space for a better look. There, draped across a mannequin, was a leather crossbody bag in the shape of—of all things—a dead opossum.

This mash-up of natural forms and cartoonish whimsy is reflective of Grannan’s biggest inspiration: dead stu , roadkill more speciﬁcally.

This macabre piece of sartorial success, I soon learned, was the work of designer Av Grannan. For her brand Sublime Remains, Grannan transforms the uglier bits of nature into stunning bags, hats, and accessories.

A few weeks ago I found myself in Grannan’s Bowmanville studio, getting a second chance to see her designs up close. “I’m still trying to figure out what Sublime Remains is right now,” Grannan tells me as she picks up one of her latest creations, a military-style flat cap designed to look like a red and yellow horseshoe crab. Grannan came up with the concept on a recent road trip where she found one of the prehistoric-looking crabs dried up on a Rhode Island beach.

“Roadkill is not the prettiest thing,” says Grannan, whose hats and bags often start as sketches of the recently deceased. Not the prettiest thing is maybe an understatement, and while you could call her designs playful, they could also be described as a little gross.

sublimeremains.com

Still, there is something undeniably beautiful about Grannan’s pieces, which sometimes represent nature in uncanny realism, like her horseshoe hat, or in a campy play on form, like her goose-shaped handbag—the handle of which is meant to resemble a goose’s bent neck.

Grannan’s fascination with roadkill began in the spring of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a return to her hometown of Wyoming, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. While at home, Grannan and her father, also an artist, would often go on long “concept walks” where they would chat about ideas for new projects. It was on one of these walks that the pair came across a fresh car casualty, a dead bird. Grannan and her dad began talking about how odd it was that people don’t really engage with roadkill beyond the usual gross-out reaction. This is despite its relative ubiquity in our daily lives; where there are cars, there is roadkill.

At the time, Grannan was working on her senior thesis in fashion design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When Grannan returned to Chicago in the fall of 2020 to complete her studies, she began to wonder how she might breathe new life into the discarded creatures she found back home.

While in her studio, Grannan showed me one of the first creations she designed as part of her thesis, a large crossbody duffle bag made to resemble a roadkill deer. Rendered in dark leather, the animal’s neck is contorted up and back so its gaze lands on the wearer, its deer-in-headlights stare posing a question I can’t place and would rather not answer. Looking at the bag too closely is like looking at the car crash that must have killed this poor animal—part of you wants to turn away and part of you is drawn back by morbid fascination. Glistening across the deer’s body are assorted taxidermy eyes and glass cabochons meant to represent the roadside gravel it must have picked up when hit.

carded futons—the leather from which she strips and upcycles into the brand’s signature designs. In this way, these discarded pieces complete a sort of life cycle, says Grannan, as they transform from animal to couch, back to some kind of couch–animal hybrid.

In addition to her alleyway ﬁnds, Grannan also picks through the scrap bins at local tanneries and buys dead stock materials from major bag companies that sell their cuto s at reduced prices. Back in her studio, Grannan pulls one of her more out-there creations o a mannequin, a backpack that vaguely resembles a cicada nymph premolt, and begins explaining where each of the piece’s materials came from. “OK, like this is from a couch part, and then this,” she points to the lining, “is from this granny jacket that I cleaned and put inside here.”

The materials, and the stories behind them, are all part of a larger world Grannan is building through her creations. She likes to imagine her creatures living in a futuristic universe where they have formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with the people who wear them. For her cicada/bug bag, she imagined an

She likes to imagine her creatures living in a futuristic universe where they have formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with the people who wear them.

The taxidermy eyes are a nod to one of Grannan’s other major inspirations—rogue taxidermy, an art form in which people stitch and stu together (already deceased) animals of di erent species, a process that often includes roadkill. Think of the stu ed “jackalopes” you might see at a highway sideshow attraction. You can sometimes find Grannan stalking Chicago’s alleyways for fresh kills—stained La-Z-Boy recliners, IKEA sectionals, or dis-

insect hitching a ride on the back of a cyclist; Granann frequently bikes between her apartment in Logan Square and her studio in Bowmanville. How would the bug grip the cyclist’s body, she wondered, and how would it move once on the go?

She designed the bag to hug the body like an insect hugs a tree branch. The back features small detachable wings. Grannan imagined these pieces ﬂuttering in the wind, perhaps allowing the cyclist to spontaneously take ﬂight. “I like making these little stories that people can engage with so they feel like they’re a part of this world that I’m building,” Grannan says. “That’s really the fun part, when the people that wear the items can feel creative and feel like they’re in this world. This world of Sublime Remains.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

TMetaphysical Shops of Chicago

3. Augustine’s Spiritual Boutique 3327 S. Halsted 773-843-1933 augustines.biz

4. Botanica Victoria 2510 W.

S. Oakley 773-619-4537 energiadelcorazoncosmico.shop

7. Fortune Divine Psychic Gifts 3023 N. Broadway 847-372-3360 fortunedivine.com

8. Gemz and Boardz 3101 W. Montrose 872-218-0307 gemzandboardz.com

9. Just Witchy’s 15530 S. Cicero, Oak Forest 708-687-1333 justwitchys.com

10. Luna’s Botanical/Psychic Luna 1712 S. Ashland 312-525-0411 psychic-luna.com

11. Malliway Bros. Magic & Witchcraft 1407 W. Morse 773-754-7546 malliwaybros.com

12. Occult Bookstore 3031 N. Milwaukee 773-292-0995 occultbookstore.com

13. Precious Possessions 28 N. Michigan 312-726-8118 preciousltd.com

14. Psychic Candle Shop 2038 S. Halsted, Suite 1 312-532-1066 psychiccandleshop.com

15. Sacred Ground 19 E. Miner, Arlington Heights 847-749-3922 shopsacredground.com

16. Sideshow Gallery 2219 N. Western 773-276-1300 sideshowgallerychicago.com

17. Spiritual Crystal Shop Botanica 2853 S. Archer 773-331-3862

18. Sprinkle Dazzle Collective/ Innergetic Vibez Creative Arts Studio 1200 W. 35th St., Studio 1D1310 312-569-9655 sprinkledazzlecollective.com

19. Tola’s Creations Botanica, Wellness, & Cultural Center 2943 W. 71st St. 773-960-4625 tolascreations.com

20. Village & Vessel 135 N. Oak Park Ave., Oak Park 708-434-5918 villageandvessel.com

= Shop online/mail order

he first thing I did when I moved to Chicago six years ago was find a local metaphysical store. While I have a hard time defining exactly what category my craft falls into (I grew up

I needed something from this new place to really settle.

Over the years, I’ve visited a number of metaphysical stores both in Chicago and across the country. Most have been lovely. Some have been cringeworthy. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a witch shop to ﬁnd an “Indian Man,” a wooden carving of a Native American person, wearing a feather headdress and with a large nose, staring back at me. Being of Tsalagi heritage, it’s upsetting to say the least.

All that is to say, I can’t recommend every store on our map with my whole chest. Some are bound to carry some questionable stuff or have practitioners who don’t stay in their cultural lane. Most, I think, are acting in good faith, but buyer, be wary and always do your research. You should not support racists, and I’m also of the opinion that if you do a ritual or spell from a closed practice (a practice that those who are not members of a particular culture or diaspora should not engage in), that magick just isn’t going to work. With that disclaimer out of the way, allow me to bring you into the wonderful world of Chicago’s magick community! Chicago is a seriously energetically charged place, both historically and environmentally.

“Chicago has always been a crossroads or a meeting ground,” Wycke Malliway of Malliway Bros. Magic and Witchcraft explains. “There’s the watershed that comes off here. All the water that blends and melts from the northern region channels through here. There’s a lot of animal migration paths that come here. Before colonizers came here, this was a speciﬁc spot for Native Americans to meet and trade. . . . Then there’s the railroads that pass through here, I could go on and on.” Malliway also says that much of the occult publishing world originated in Chicago, and for that reason much of the metaphysical community has always gathered here. In other words, Salem, Massachusetts, has nothing on Windy City witches. v m crenken@chicagoreader.com

which the staﬀ are happy to help you cra , or an odd gi for an equally odd loved one. The second floor, which is accessible from the outside door to the left of the shop, is split into three rooms. The first is the gallery space where rotating artists put on installations and shows of their work. At the moment, the gallery is home to Matthew Ryan Sharp and his “Fellowship of October Fire” installation. The shop also o en holds classes in this space. Pass through a door in the gallery and you will find the tarot parlor saved specifically for

are welcome to take the provided string and attach their worries to the doll’s body in the form of feathers or cloth in order to get rid of them. I walked away from Wally feeling lighter. I also walked away with my camera malfunctioning, which store staﬀer Phoenix Arcana Lightwood said was likely “because of the ghosts.” Those looking to check out Malliway for the ﬁrst time should attend the shop’s Ancestor Ritual/Halloween Party on October 26. The event will start with a ritual for calling on and thanking ancestors, followed by a party with divination, food, and more. v

OCCULT

Excavating the ills and merits of Black capitalism

J K Chukwu writes horror with keen, uncanny detail.

By ANNETTE LEPIQUE

JK Chukwu is a midwestern and Nigerian writer who’s lived in Chicago, off and on, for the last decade. She attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, completed her MFA at Brown University, and now advises in the creative writing program at U of C. Her ﬁrst novel The Unfortunates (2023) is an account of the horrors faced by and the hard-won triumphs of Sahara: a young, queer, Black, Nigerian woman enrolled in a prestigious, predominantly white institution whose classmates, specifically other young Black people, are turning up dead. No one, however, seems to care.

Horror then, whether it be the fear of what we see, or what (or whom) is kept hidden, is something that Chukwu writes with keen, uncanny detail. Chukwu is an investigator who delves into the anxieties and fears that lie beneath the visions of the world given to us by institutions like schools, governments, and corporations. Her forthcoming novel, The Conservator, applies this exacting examination to the veneer of Black capitalism and the costs of fetishization. Her newest story, “Flight 2212,” in the horror collection Of the Flesh, peels back

the dangers of our shallow Instagram inﬂuencer and MLM schemer obsessed culture.

Chukwu wants to look beneath the surface to understand our assumptions, our wants, our fears; it’s a process she’s very, very good at.

Annette LePique: Thank you so much for joining me! Could you describe your writing practice?

J K Chukwu: When I write, I enjoy understanding the underbelly of institutions, their corruption, their hidden violences, and their dirt from the perspective of Black queer femmes.

As I write, I like imagining my writing as a house, a really old apartment. In that apartment, I’m peeling back layers and layers of carpet and seeing everything that’s left over and everything that crawls out from my efforts. For instance, in The Unfortunates I examine how academia as an institution can oppress already marginalized Black people.

In terms of a practice, I think of my writing through the lens of habits, or more aptly rituals. I have to write a certain amount of time each week. My writing also always begins with a question. These questions are sometimes unanswerable, but it’s through the journey of trying to ﬁnd an answer that I create the body of a story.

Your mention of that evocative image of the apartment and the carpet makes me think of how horror, whether it’s the sensation or the narrative genre, depends upon the discovery of knowledge that was once hidden. What relationship does your writing have with horror?

Living in this world often feels like living in a haunted house. I say that because there are so many histories and memories everywhere that you may sense as reverberations, apparitions, or echoes as you go about your day.

In terms of my writing, I’m a big believer in going to the basement, the root, the source of

your pain so you can ask how was this infrastructure built, what materials were used, and how can I understand those materials and learn how to use their strength against them? How can I dismantle this house?

How do you feel about horror? What scares you?

What I understand horror to be is the feeling of being so displaced and so outside of yourself that you no longer have a deﬁnite sense of your body, your intentions, or even who you are. I feel like that sensation or circumstances that lead to this feeling are horrific because you’re then vulnerable to something unwanted to come inside you.

I enjoyed that the glamorous woman who Tulsa and Kim encountered on the plane who had already received “Matching Pairs” surgery was likened to a “Nubian Lady Liberty.” In contrast to the wealthy woman is a group who resists the new standard that she exemplifies. What do you want readers to ponder about the relationship between ambivalence, resistance, community, and Blackness in America?

I grew up in a Christian, Catholic household, so the idea of something coming uninvited to your home or your body has always been compelling to me. Though such a feeling also speaks to me as a Black woman as I move through a world that inundates me with messages about who I should be.

I feel so grateful to be a part of the horror anthology Of the Flesh , out this month, because it gave me the chance to not only share my ideas of horror but to play with and challenge my own preconceptions of what is truly scary. In my story, “Flight 2212,” there’s a world where people are not born with hands or feet, there’s only bone. There are new beauty standards and new codes of social conduct to which Black women are now held. I explore my protagonist Tulsa’s ambivalence towards the gruesome measures she’ll need to take to adhere to these new standards and how compliance would grant her access to Black capitalist spaces. However, these same standards are actively working to displace what Tulsa’s body actually wants and needs.

I am interested in thinking through Black capitalism, its merits and its issues. Oftentimes, you’ll see brands have collaborations with Black celebrities and there’s a rush to purchase the objects being sold. In the past, I found myself online scrolling for hours trying to make these same purchases. I put in all this time and effort for things I didn’t want and [that] the original Black creators only see a fraction of the profits from. However, under the logics of Black capitalism, to be seen as a powerful Black individual is to own x, y, and z. My goal is to celebrate Black identity in ways that aren’t linked to using money to prove your worth or prove that you belong. In addition, the attempt of institutions to rewrite their sordid pasts with ﬂimsy initiatives or promises will always be a catalyst for my work. If an institution that is built from pain still upholds its harmful legacies, how much can we trust these acts of atonement? vA longer version of this piece appears online at chicagoreader.com.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Author J K Chukwu LO BRADEN

R REMEMBER YOU WILL DIE by Eden Robins Sourcebooks, paperback, 336 pp., $16 99, read.sourcebooks. com/9781728256030 -remember-you-will-die-tp.html

REVIEW

R REMEMBER YOU WILL DIE book launch Tue 10/22 , 7 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, womenandchildrenfirst.com/event/person-book-launch-rememberyou-will-die-eden-robins, free, registration required

Can an AI character experience life like a human?

Eden Robins’s sci-ﬁ novel is structured as a series of obituaries.

By EMILY MCCLANATHAN

“The condition of living is eventually leaving.” This refrain echoes across space and time in Remember You Will Die, a kaleidoscopic science fiction novel by Chicago author Eden Robins. Structured as a series of obituaries, Robins’s literary puzzle box uses an AI character’s story to examine the very human experiences of love, jealousy, betrayal, grief, mortality, and the search for meaning.

Beginning in November 2102 with the apparent suicide of 17-year-old Poppy Fletcher in New York City, the novel gradually threads together Poppy’s backstory. The daughter of computer scientist Matthew Fletcher and Peregrine, the AI he created and fell in love with, Poppy was conceived through “in vitro gametogenesis,” an experimental fertility treatment involving frozen human eggs, a donated human uterus, and human skin cells transformed into sperm. In this speculative future, AI reproduction is illegal and raises the ire of an anti-AI group called the Disengagists. So Peregrine, whose name means “wanderer,” raises her daughter as a fugitive with the help of some compassionate humans. Peregrine and Poppy show up throughout the book, and the time-hopping structure provides a sweeping scope that ranges from ancient Roman epitaphs to dispatches from the first human colonists on Mars. This reading experience requires daisy-chaining details—names, plot points, recurring phrases and images—of a fragmented narrative. It’s the kind of book I immediately wanted to start over after ﬁnishing, to pick up references that help form a more complete picture.

Although several key characters are scientists—including Dr. Jill Firestein, in a nod to Victor Frankenstein—many of the obituaries feature artistic types: musicians, writers, sculptors, cartoonists, photographers, actors, ﬁlmmakers, performance artists, illusionists, and nightclub performers. Many of them grapple with the meaning of art in their particular time and place in history, whether ﬁghting for women’s rights in 19th-century Paris or facing an accelerating climate crisis and wealth in-

equality in the 21st- and 22nd-century U.S.

Robins’s characters are not only concerned with the purpose of art or science; they also seek to understand the meaning of individual lives—whether their own or that of a lost loved one—and the very idea of legacy. As the title and the focus on obituaries suggest, mortality is a major theme, and characters greet death with starkly di erent attitudes.

Take Dante Pellegrino, a fictional 20thcentury film star who appears in several vignettes. “We are not meant to be remembered,” she yells at her director and rumored lover, Louise Flechette, during an intense shoot. “You are afraid you will be forgotten because your life is a disappointment! But I look forward to oblivion.”

When her ﬁlm is rediscovered in the 1970s, American Film magazine memorializes the actress, writing, “Profoundly mistrustful of her own legacy, Dante Pellegrino would have hated this belated obituary. But then again, such remembrances are not for the dead at all. They are for the living—the living now and the living to come. Remember us, we whisper into the ears of the future. Our mistakes have made you possible.”

In Robins’s imagined future, new vaccines extend the lives of those who can a ord them. Nevertheless, obituaries experience “a nationwide renaissance” in the U.S. in the mid- to late-21st century, “for, of course, a plethora of unfortunate reasons,” writes Indiana’s Brown County Democrat in a fictional tribute to its

of life, an AI collective hiding in the cloud observes humanity, learning from their messy existences.

“We have such a love of etymology—a treasure chest of hidden human meaning— we are always searching for meaning, always, perhaps because we have no memories of our own to review, only the influx of worldly data,” they write.

Throughout the book, Robins intersperses brief sections outlining the etymology of thematically relevant words such as poppy, grief, rumor, legacy, and guilt, examining gems from the treasure chest of language to illustrate how words change over time. Although these interludes aren’t written from the AI’s perspective, you can almost feel them reading over your shoulder to gain insight into the human condition. Robins also uses these sections to provide glimpses into the emotional state of key characters.

Frank. The futuristic chapters don’t tread much new ground for science ﬁction or dystopian literature but do feel sadly prescient with the continued presence of pandemics, school shootings, weather disasters, skyrocketing healthcare costs, housing crises, and unscrupulous trillionaires (surely, we’re not too far o from someone shattering that green-tinted glass ceiling).

While the human characters try to make sense of life, an AI collective hiding in the cloud observes humanity, learning from their messy existences.

longtime obituary writer, Mike Mattingly.

“To Mike, the obituary was an art form in itself, and not only that, a necessary ritual of death,” the piece continues, before quoting the deceased: “Closure is mighty rare. You hardly ever get to see the full arc of a life, see the meaning emerge. That’s our job. We are the librarians of life; we are its humble secretaries.”

While the human characters try to make sense

Unfortunately, we don’t often get more than hints at characters’ inner lives due to the novel’s unconventional format. This makes it dicult to feel connected to characters, even major ones like Peregrine and Poppy, although there are some touching moments in later chapters.

Still, Remember You Will Die o ers a fascinating and fresh reading experience. I especially enjoyed the historical fiction chapters and a speculative subplot involving Anne

As with the best science fiction, though, this novel is not really about the mechanics of developing an embodied AI and enabling her to reproduce. It’s about the human experience as seen through the eyes of a nonhuman character who lives, loves, and loses as much as any human. It’s about people through the centuries making sense of their “tiny, glorious sliver of time between oblivions to live.” And even in the toughest of times, these slivers can be quite beautiful. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

COURTESY SOURCEBOOKS

OCCULT

FEATURE

Theatrical witch hunts

Kay Daly talks about witches onstage, from the 1600s to today.

By KERRY REID

In the prologue to 1994’s Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, author Anne Llewellyn Barstow observes, “The longer I have worked on these sixteenthand seventeenth-century events, the more I have found them relevant to problems of violence and discrimination against women today.”

Witchcraft and witches have appeared onstage for centuries, from the three weird sisters in Macbeth to Elphaba and Glinda in Wicked . But scholar Kay Daly, like Barstow, finds contemporary resonance in the ways that they’re depicted, even in older texts. She’s currently teaching a course at Newberry Library, “When Shall These Three Meet Again?” Witches on Stage.

Daly notes that her ﬁrst course on witches in literature wasn’t entirely about theatrical texts. “I did some novels. We did Grimms’ Fairy Tales . We did Into the Woods , which is onstage, but it’s not something I’d usually teach in a lit class. The ﬁrst day of class, I’m introducing myself and I’m meeting all the kids. I said, ‘Any questions?’ And one kid said, ‘What happened to the dragons?’ I had to explain, ‘Sorry, Dragon Lady got a job outside in the real world. So she’s not here.’”

Daly says, “It’s actually kind of funny because I don’t consider myself somebody who’s like totally into occult. This has not been a thing. I don’t consider myself a witchy woman, despite the fact that I read my tarot cards all the time.”

centuries earlier. The way it works is that when you first meet the witch of Edmonton, she’s not a witch yet. She’s talking about how people treat her like crap because of her status, because she’s a woman, because she’s older, because she’s poor, and that they mutter behind her back and they accuse her of things.

Daly, who used to review theater for Time Out Chicago and has a PhD in English from Northwestern, says she started developing the course almost by accident. During grad school, she was asked to teach a freshman seminar at Northwestern on Shakespeare and feminism. “And then they contacted me and they said, ‘We had somebody drop out in the fall. Could you do dragons and literature?’ That was somebody else’s course. And I went, ‘I don’t know, send me the syllabus.’ And they sent me the syllabus, and I think out of all the works on it, there was one work I’d read, like Beowulf. And I said, ‘I absolutely cannot teach this course.’”

Daly’s reading list for her Newberry course includes familiar classic titles like Macbeth and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible alongside more obscure plays, like The Witch of Edmonton, written around 1621 by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford (and possibly others).

“She’s talking about how people treat her like crap because of her status, because she’s a woman, because she’s older, because she’s poor.”

She asked if she could switch her Shakespeare course to that slot. “I’m sitting looking at my bookshelf and I’m pulling things o the shelf, and I’m starting to notice they’ve all got witches in them. I was like, ‘Wait a second. That’s an idea.’ It’s not dragons, but you know, it’s in the ballpark. And so I asked them and they said, ‘Sure, do it.’”

Daly notes that The Witch of Edmonton , which came about nearly two decades after Macbeth was ﬁrst produced, is based on a real witch trial of the era. Elizabeth Sawyer, an unmarried woman who lived in Buckinghamshire and had long been suspected of witchcraft due to her predilection for blunt talk (or “oaths and blasphemies,” as some sources describe it), was declared a witch and executed in 1621— after women enlisted by the court to examine her found an alleged “witch’s mark” near her anus. (Just one piece of evidence for the fact that patriarchy depends upon women willing to do the dirty work for men in exchange for perceived security.)

“The witch plot ends up being kind of the B plot,” says Daly. “It’s also kind of this weird murder ballad story. So they put these two stories together, but what’s so fascinating is that it’s set in the present day for them. They’re not writing about Macbeth, [a character] from

“And she says, ‘You know, fine, then I’m just gonna summon the devil.’ So she summons the devil, and sells her soul and becomes a witch. It’s a literalization of the notion that society creates witches, and a sociological perspective that Shakespeare absolutely does not apply to witches at all.”

The Witch of Edmonton inspired contemporary playwright Jen Silverman’s Witch, which had its world premiere with Writers Theatre in 2018 and was revived locally by the Artistic Home in 2023. Silverman’s darkly comic approach to the story sees Sawyer’s character challenging “Old Scratch” to make his case to her, as if he’s a suitor. The irony is that the woman accused of being a witch is a much harder sell than the people around her, who are quick to bargain with the devil. That brings to mind the maxim that “every accusation is a confession”—one that has had particular resonance when looking at MAGA politicians who keep getting hoisted on their own moralistic petards.

Belief in witches also feeds into the conspiratorial mindset.

“That came up explicitly in our very first

class [at Newberry],” says Daly. “It wasn’t led by me. It was led by the students. They immediately saw the parallel between some of the things that are happening in politics right now and in general culture. And what we came around to was that the overarching motif really is the conspiracy theory. That’s been writ large, you know, with all the QAnon stu . With every news story that comes out, there’s an assumption there’s more beneath the surface than we are seeing here, which is the essence of witchcraft belief.”

As Daly notes, it’s a way of making sense of the world that places blame on others. “It can’t be as simple as bad things happen to people. It has to be ‘a cabal has come together to thwart me.’ So it feeds feelings of self-importance.”

She adds, “The funny thing about a witchcraft scare is that the people who start the scare, who claim there are witches among us,

ANNA WAGNER FOR CHICAGO

tend to be more powerful than the people they attack. They’re appropriating a powerless stance.”

The fact that accusations of witchcraft so often landed on women who were marginalized by being single, older, and poorer, and who also often worked as healers or midwives, is crucial to understanding the gender and class dynamics at work in witchcraft trials (and in understanding the motives of someone like JD Vance, who attacks single, childless women with vitriolic abandon). Gender and class discrimination are very present in British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1976 portrait of 16th-century English witchcraft trials, Vinegar Tom , which is also on Daly’s Newberry syllabus. Not coincidentally, Churchill’s play came out during the height of second-wave feminism. It got a riot grrrl–style revival locally with Red Theater two years ago.

Daly notes that the story of Macbeth involves “an inversion of the natural order. The reason the witches have to play a role in Macbeth, and the reason that Lady Macbeth has to say, ‘Unsex me here,’ is because this evil represents an overturning of the natural order. Which is what happens when Macbeth kills Duncan. And that’s why there are storms, and that’s why horses are breaking free and eating each other, and everybody’s doing unnatural things—because the world is out of joint.”

Daly adds, “Early on, in the [Newberry] ses-

Several shows onstage this fall have a witchy element to them.

Becky Nurse of Salem

In Sarah Ruhl’s play, produced by Shattered Globe Theatre (review p. 26), a descendant of Rebecca Nurse (executed for witchcraft in Salem in 1692) works as a tour guide at the Salem Witch Museum and ponders if things have really changed that much for women since Puritan times. Through 11/16, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, sgtheatre.org

Bell, Book and Candle

John Van Druten’s vintage rom-com about a witch and the publisher she sets her heart on returns with Saint Sebastian Players. 10/18-11/10, St. Bonaventure, 1625 W. Diversey, saintsebastianplayers.org

Witches of Eastwick

Derek Begrudgingly, a new company

OCCULT

sion, somebody had made the comment, ‘Well, the witches plant the seed with Macbeth.’ And I said, ‘Do they? Let’s look at the text.’ Because in the text, they just announce these prophecies and Macbeth starts and looks shocked, and it’s a big enough moment that Banquo talks about it, like, ‘Oh, he’s really unsettled over there.’ And there’s a reading of it that says, ‘Yeah, it’s not so much they planted the seed as they manifest something he’s already thought about.’”

Despite the dark history of witchcraft trials, Daly notes that Silverman’s Witch ends on a questioning note. “What I love about that play is she never really becomes a witch. But also that then where [Elizabeth] goes instead is, ‘How do we fix this culture? Maybe we just burn it to the ground and start over.’”

Elizabeth’s last lines in Silverman’s play might well be portents to this election season: “One day we’ll notice that nothing around us seems to have changed, everyone is just as vicious and frightened and banal as they were before. We’ll think: Shouldn’t anything at all have changed? And then at that moment, whenever it comes, we’ll think of this moment, right now. We’ll think: Oh. We had the chance to change all of this. We did have it. We just said, ‘No.’” v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

making their mark with onstage versions of popular films, takes on the 1987 movie (based on a John Updike novel) of three women who are unaware they are witches—until Jack Nicholson’s mysterious stranger arrives in their small Rhode Island town. 10/18–10/19, Bricktown, instagram. com/derekbegrudgingly

Macbeth

Invictus stages Shakespeare’s tragedy with the three weird sisters. 10/29–12/15, Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W. Irving Park, invictustheatreco.com

Macbeth by the Sea

Chicago playwright Joe Janes’s version of “the Scottish Play,” a hit at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, imagines the Macbeths trying to forget all the bloodshed with a relaxing beach vacation. 11/20-12/15, Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, thedentheatre.com

THEATER OPENING

R Revisionist religion

The Ten Commandments get a comic rewrite in An Act of God.

David Javerbaum’s comic one-act, about God and his mysterious ways, is a delightfully contradictory show, at once a send-up of shallow TV values, a parody of bad old-old-time religion (now, sadly, making a comeback) and a witty, intelligent exegesis of the Bible and the crazy, unpredictable, but oddly beguiling ways of the Old Testament deity. At least that’s how Alex Weisman plays Him—mercurial, seductive, charming, easily angered, one minute amusing us with sweet comic one-liners, the next earning big laughs with sharptongued cutting remarks.

The show’s premise is that God has decided to rewrite the Ten Commandments to better suit the modern age—and to undercut the excesses of fundamentalists who would use His words to promote hate and confusion. The result is a funny, openhearted, 75-minute piece that, in the spirit of Mark Twain or Jon Stewart (Javerbaum was for a time a writer and later producer on Show the values they pretend to uphold. Beneath the show’s myriad punchlines boils considerable righteous anger at the bigotry, racism, misogyny, and homophobia that motivates so many “Christians.”

But the current revival of this production at Paramount’s Copley Theatre, under the guiding hand of director Keira Fromm, keeps a lid on Javerbaum’s moralizing (which could, in the wrong hands, get to be too much) in favor of winning us over with laughter. Much of the praise for this should go to Weisman, who has an easygoing manner onstage that sweetens the author’s bitterest quips. Weisman is aided in his comic mission by two adept, comic sidekicks, Em Modaﬀ and Michael Turrentine (as, respectively, the archangels Gabriel and Michael). —JACK HELBIG AN ACT OF GOD Through 11/10: Wed 1:30 and 7 PM, Thu 7 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 1 and 5:30 PM; ASL interpretation Fri 11/8; Paramount Copley Theatre, 8 E. Galena, Aurora, 630-896-6666, paramountaurora.com, $40-$55

RBewitched, bothered, and bewildered

Becky Nurse of Salem brings witch hunts into the

Reiter), a descendant of Salem victim Rebecca Nurse, while she raises her teenage granddaughter (Isabella Maria Valdés) and navigates intergenerational trauma, chronic pain, the opioid crisis, and ﬁnancial insecurity. Meanwhile, the language of “witch hunts” and chants of

Some of Ruhl’s plot points seem far-fetched; Becky, though clearly in a desperate situation, comes across as overly gullible in her dealings with a local witch (Rebecca Jordan). And several minor characters feel

The Golden Girls Meet the Skooby Don’t Gang: The Mystery of the Haunted Bush

RICK AGUILAR STUDIOS

THEATER

one-dimensional, due to both the writing and acting. But in the end, Ruhl’s spiky heroine and her small but sweet circle of loved ones won me over in this supernaturally tinged family drama. —EMILY MCCLANATHAN BECKY NURSE OF SALEM Through 11/16: Thu–Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sat 11/16 3 PM; audio description and touch tour Fri 11/8 (touch tour 6:45 PM), open captions Sun 11/10; Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, sgtheatre.org, $15–$52

RSkooby snacks

Hell in a Handbag mashes up its Golden Girls franchise with cartoon teen detectives.

Two television universes have unexpectedly collided on Chopin Theatre’s mainstage with The Golden Girls Meet the Skooby Don’t Gang: The Mystery of the Haunted Bush—a funny and raunchy new installment in Hell in a Handbag’s popular Golden Girls parody franchise.

It turns out that Rose’s (Ed Jones, excellent here) nephew is none other than fresh-out-of-the-closet amateur sleuth Fred (Tyler Anthony Smith) of the Skooby Don’t gang, who wander the country solving the creepiest mysteries. Fred’s got Skooby (Ben Meneses)—not to be confused with a certain canine crimefighter whose copyright is closely guarded by Warner Bros. Discovery—and the perpetually stoned Skaggy (Josh Kemper) in tow. They’re of course joined by Velva (Caitlin Jackson) and Daffy (Elizabeth Lesinski), both in the throes of fully realizing their burgeoning pansexuality.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so the appearance of the Mystery, Inc. (-ish) Gang means some monster will appear in their wake. Cue the titular Bush Monster, who for some reason seems to have its sights set on Rose. Writer and Handbag artistic director David Cerda tosses in a world-weary nonagenarian Nancy Drew (Danne W. Taylor) for good measure.

The details of the mystery don’t make too much sense, and the script could have used some tightening. But the wisecracks just keep coming, this time punctuated with high-energy slapstick once the Bush Monster attacks the Golden Girls’ house. A bit wherein the Golden Girls and the Skooby gang swap identities—especially when a Skooby Don’t outﬁt manages to make Cerda’s Dorothy even dowdier—is alone worth the price of admission. Excellent direction from Frankie Leo Bennett and a fully game cast make this one a must-see. —MATT SIMONETTE THE GOLDEN GIRLS MEET THE SKOOBY DON’T GANG: THE MYSTERY OF THE HAUNTED BUSH Through 11/3: Thu–Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sun 10/20–10/27 and Wed 10/30 8 PM; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, handbagproductions. org, $38–$60

R

Bubblegum tragedy

Euripides gets a pop music makeover in The Love Object.

I can’t say this millennial was aware they were seeing a modern adaptation of a Greek tragedy (Hippolytus), but it shouldn’t have been surprising, given the fates of many of our early 2000s pop music girlies. The Story Theatre’s world premiere of its emerging playwright-in-residence Justine Gelfman’s one-act is a funny, sharp, and ultimately quite dark love aﬀair with an era of music that chewed up and spit out its female stars. The fact that it feels like it’s in conversation with both Eurip-

ides and Britney Spears’s recent memoir speaks to the strong writing and, unfortunately, to the timelessness of misogyny and false idols. The star in question here is Ramona (a charismatic Emily Holland), selling out stadiums from within a fame prison that’s slowly destroying her personhood.

Under Jasmine B. Gunter’s direction, this production uses a small space strategically to illustrate the ugly underside of fame, starting out with clever tour rehearsal scenes featuring the stereotypically tacky “out of this world” space aesthetic so common at that time. Ramona’s best friend and assistant Paula (a multidimensional Kaylah Marie Crosby) giving her notice is our ﬁrst glimpse of the crumbling foundation, and from there, it’s a race to the bottom of narcissistic self-interest. Paula puts it best: “If everyone else is selling out their friends to get ahead, then why can’t I?” While this isn’t a new story onscreen, bringing it to life in a live theater setting with a cast this capable adds a uniquely raw, “under the microscope” element to both the humor and bitter end.

—MARISSA OBERLANDER THE LOVE OBJECT Through 11/3: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, thestorytheatre.org, $20 (students/active military/veterans $10)

RThe not-so-friendly confines

Que Te Vaya Bien delivers a home run.

Subtext Studio Theatre Company’s production of Omar Vicente Fernandez’s Que Te Vaya Bien marks the reunion of two actors—Nelson A. Rodriguez and Adriel Irizarry—who delivered knockout performances as boxers in Visión Latino’s production of Franky D. Gonzalez’s That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven during last year’s Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival. In Que Te Vaya Bien, receiving its world premiere as part of the seventh edition of Destinos, they play a father and son who have to come to terms with their troubled, dysfunctional relationship.

The boxing ring was the stage in Gonzalez’s play; in Fernandez’s, it’s the Wrigley Field bleachers as the Cubs play the Brewers, this duo turning them into the not-so-friendly confines. Elias (Irizarry), an overstressed attorney for the Cook County DA’s Office, receives a voicemail from his wife announcing that she is pregnant. The news comes at a strained moment in their relationship. He is on his way to meet his father Mario (Rodriguez) a er finally accepting his invitation to go to at least one ball game with him.

It’s hard to write about what comes next in Que Te Vaya Bien without giving away a major plot reveal, one that really doesn’t come as a shock given how Fernandez prepares the audience for it through small clues in the dialogue and how director Octavio Montes De Oca and sound designer Gina Montalvo manipulate sound to create a sense of isolation and hyperreality. Suﬃce it to say that it’s a play about the things that are le unsaid in a relationship: the regret, the anger, the mixed feelings that weigh us down, and the fear of making the same mistakes our ancestors made. Irizarry delivers all of the above with such strident force that you fear he is about to lose his mind while Rodriguez’s Mario delivers most of his ripostes with devil-may-care elan. Que Te Vaya Bien demands, and repays you for, your complete attention.

—ALEJANDRO A. RIERA QUE TE VAYA BIEN Through 10/27: Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Sat 10/26 2:30 PM; Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, subtextstudiotc.org, $26 (students/seniors/military $16), in English with Spanish subtitles v

TICKETS

OCCULT

ESSAY

DAMIEN: OMEN II ( 1978) R, 107 min. Hulu, VOD

CHILD’S PLAY (1988) R, 87 min. AMC+, Philo, VOD CANDYMAN (1992) R, 99 min. The Logan Theatre, Peacock, AMC+, Philo, VOD

Fear of revolution haunts occult ﬁlms

Considering race in three Chicago-based horror movies

By NOAH BERLATSKY

Occult ﬁlms often link their nefarious demonic forces to marginalized people— common tropes include Indigenous graveyards, witchy women consorting with devils, evil bloodsucking ambiguously Jewish foreign vampires. Horror is often horror about marginalized, erased, dispossessed people whose existence or memory threatens a white, patriarchal, colonial status quo. Bad conscience and fear of revolution haunt occult ﬁlms.

Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., and it’s not surprising that horror ﬁlms set in the city often associate the forces of evil with Black people. But the association is often made as much through absence as presence. Many supernatural ﬁlms set in Chicago exclude Black people in the day-to-day of the city yet place the origins of evil in the hands of one of the few Black characters or undergird the stories in racist anxieties.

The 1978 horror sequel Damien: Omen II was both set and ﬁlmed in Chicago. (There are scenes of downtown Chicago and a scene in Graceland Cemetery.) The conceit of the ﬁlm is that the head of megaconglomerate Thorn Industries, Richard Thorn (William Holden), has, unfortunately for him, adopted the antichrist in the form of his brother’s child, Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor).

Most of the movie is set amidst the lavish lifestyle of the hyperrich, who are overwhelmingly white. A few of the domestic staff are Black, as are a handful of the personnel at the military academy Damien and his cousin attend. There’s also a Black doctor (Meshach Taylor) who investigates Damien’s weird DNA. (The investigation, unsurprisingly, does not go well for the doctor.)

There is one prominent black ﬁgure in the ﬁlm, though. That’s a large raven that appears ominously just before Damien’s potential enemies die in mysterious and gruesome fashion. It sits on the bed of Damien’s suspicious aunt who wants to disinherit him, provoking a heart attack. It claws and blinds a pesky journalist who is snooping where she shouldn’t. (The bird, perhaps tellingly, is not present at the doctor’s death. In fact, it silently vanishes from the movie after he is killed,

as if the belated recognition that Black people exist frightened the bird away or made it feel superﬂuous.)

Omen II —like its predecessor and The Exorcist (1973), which inspired the Omen series—is focused primarily on anxieties about insubordinate and ungrateful youth. At a time when the civil rights movement and Vietnam-era protests were in the very recent past, a parable about privileged kids overturning their parents’ Christian, patriarchal order had a queasy resonance—which echoes now as the same narratives are spun about today’s protesters.

The raven—dramatically framed against a snowy field in one memorable scene—is a symbol of Damien and therefore, arguably, of rebellious, entitled, and malevolent youth. It’s also, though, a subliminal reminder of the 40 percent of the population of Chicago who we barely see in the ﬁlm, and of how youth protest and civil rights protests were intertwined. These anxieties are rendered more explicit in another fear-the-children Chicago occult sortof classic, 1988’s Child’s Play. In this movie, the antagonist is not the devil directly. Instead, a murdered serial killer named Chucky improbably manages to cast his spirit into a (freakishly large) doll. That doll ends up in the possession

The most famous occult Chicago ﬁlm is almost certainly Candyman (1992), largely set in Cabrini-Green and featuring many more Black actors than Omen II or Child’s Play . Its high concept is also a good bit more convoluted. But like its predecessors, at its core is a knot of fear involving young people and race.

single mom Karen (Catherine Hicks). The killer-in-the-doll then sets about taking revenge on former enemies and his adopted family.

The movie is significantly down-market from Omen II in both its budget and its setting, which means that you see a good bit more of the Chicago streets. Whiteness still dominates the screen, though. There are a few Black people on the train, which Chucky induces Andy to ride to the south side as part of his murderous plot. But everybody with a speaking part, wherever they live in the city, is white.

With one exception. Chucky, we find out, gained his supernatural powers by studying with John Bishop (Raymond Oliver), a Black man proﬁcient in a (racist caricature of) vodun. John, aka Dr. Death, forswears Chucky’s perversion of his arts. But under torture, he does explain to Chucky that to prolong his life, he needs to abandon the doll’s body and possess Andy.

Thus, the terror of the ﬁlm is that black— and Black—magic will take over or steal away (white) children. Andy is a good, dutiful kid who brings his mother breakfast in bed. But he’s tempted by a bad, rebellious ﬁgure who goes to the wrong side of town (where not everyone is white) and who has learned bad habits (like necromancy) from Black people.

In this case, the murderous supernatural Candyman (Tony Todd) is the ghost of a young Black painter, Daniel Robitaille, who fell in love and fathered a child with a white woman. When the woman’s father discovered her pregnancy, he tortured Daniel to death, turning him into a vengeful spirit. Rather than a child, the mixed-race a air births horror. It’s worth emphasizing that in each of these occult Chicago ﬁlms, Blackness and Black people are not in themselves a danger. Omen II , Child’s Play, and Candyman all include Black characters who are not monsters or spectral murderers. Similarly, they all feature children who are not devil-spawns. It is not children or Black adults alone who summon the antichrist. It’s the intermingling, or intersection, of the two. When white children listen to, ally themselves with, or love Black people, ideas, or causes—that’s the moment, in these ﬁlms, when children and Black people forget their proper subordinate place and reality totters toward the abyss.

Young people rejecting the racism of their parents threatens to destroy the world. That’s the central message of these ﬁlms, and it explains—or at least foreshadows—the recent moral panic about and overreaction to the student demonstrations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian marches are protesting anti-Palestinian racism rather than interrelated anti-Black racism. But that doesn’t change the fact that for decades, young people who set themselves against whiteness have been imaginatively represented as assaulting the underpinnings of reality itself.

No wonder that Congresspeople, administrators, and police all reacted to the protests with arrests and hyperbolic censure. In the popular imagination, anti-racist and anti-imperialist young people are the antichrist. Damian, Chucky, and Candyman have betrayed whiteness, and so they are no longer children, but monstrosity returned upon, and indeed born to, the perpetrators of monstrosity. In ﬁlm after ﬁlm, across decade after decade, the horror in Chicago—and not just in Chicago—is that white people’s children will judge them. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

of Andy (Alex Vincent), the child of

ANNA WAGNER FOR CHICAGO READER

FILM

The most interesting fact about myself that I save for such occasions when people want to hear one is that my husband and I got engaged after a week. Of course, this is not to say that the most interesting thing about a woman is her marital status, but it is quite a story, an aberration in what has heretofore been a mostly ordinary life. (Any abnormality, it would seem, is confined to my head.) It’s even more relevant for this column as my husband is Ben Sachs, who, when I met him, was a full-time film critic for the Reader , and with whom I coedit Cine-File.

This weekend was our wedding anniversary. Eleven years ago, on October 12, we got married; we had gotten engaged a little less than a year before that, one week to the day after our ﬁrst date. And what did we do on that date? We saw a movie—Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971), presented by the Chicago Film Society at the Portage Theater. It was a Wednesday, as the Film Society’s screenings always were back then and still regularly are now. A week later, we saw John Ford’s 1927 silent ﬁlm Upstream, again presented by the Chicago Film Society at the Portage Theater. That night, he asked me to marry him, I said yes, and here we are—movie lovers in love.

So, of course, we spent this weekend accordingly—seeing movies. Three, to be exact: Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969). In terms of how these films might relate to marriage, Colonel Blimp is the most obvious choice, as the story spans much of the titular ﬁgure’s life, including the women—well, one woman, really, whose likeness and disposition he seeks in later companions (all played by Deborah Kerr)—whom he loves.

But it was Fitzcarraldo that resonated with

me as an allegory for marriage. In the ﬁlm, famously (or infamously, depending on how you look at it), a boat is hauled over a mountain, both onscreen and in real life. This represents Fitzcarraldo’s relentless ambition to amass a fortune as a rubber baron so that he can build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle. The mountain is life, and the boat is marriage, being pulled, against all odds, over it. And it’s not necessarily that it’s hard (relationships are always hard, to an extent, but loving my husband is the easiest thing I’ve ever done), but there’s so much standing in the way that it feels miraculous when any person, let alone two, can achieve such a seemingly impossible feat. Finally, love is the opera, the reason it’s all worth it.

It’s always a treat to see a Melville ﬁlm on the big screen, though nothing in a film about the French Resistance can be related to marriage. But love also applies to friends, of course. With one I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (better than I expected!), and with another, I celebrated her birthday by seeing the excellent double feature she programmed at Facets, Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2019) and a made-for-TV movie, I’m Dangerous Tonight (1990), by horror master Tobe Hooper. The double-feature theme was “Dressed to Impress,” as both ﬁlms involve haunted dresses that wreak havoc on their wearers. That was my first foray into spooky season movies for the month, though there’s more to come as I attempt the entire Music Box of Horrors marathon this weekend.

Anyway, to my husband, I love you. Very much.

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

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

October 10 - November 3

The Chopin Theatre • 1543 W. Division St. Go to handbagproductions.org Tickettailor.com for ticket options

A still from Fitzcarraldo (1982) COURTESY MAD ARTS

The Golden Girls M t The Sk by Don’t Gang: Hell in a Handbag Productions presents the World Premiere of

By David Cerda Frankie Leo Bennett

Directed & Choreographed by

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UPCOMING SHOWS

NOW PLAYING

RThe Silent Hour

Brad Anderson’s The Silent Hour is a taut, watchable thriller with pleasantly predictable genre beats. It’s also a nuanced and thoughtful take on disability and deafness, which was not predictable at all.

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

deaf and disabled representation in the genre. —NOAH BERLATSKY R, 99 min. Limited release in theaters, wide release on VOD

R

Terrifier 3

OCT

The ﬁlm starts as a typical cop drama; Frank (Joel Kinnaman) is your familiar righteous cowboy homicide detective. But his righteous cowboying rides him right into an accident where he badly damages both his ears. He is frustrated by the way his disability impacts his job, and he’s thinking of quitting the force. Then his former partner (Mark Strong) asks him to act as an interpreter for Ava (Sandra Mae Frank), a deaf witness to the execution of two drug dealers. When the killers try to silence Ava, she and Frank end up ﬂeeing for their lives through her mostly abandoned apartment building, pursued by Lynch (the extremely charismatic Mekhi Phifer).

As gritty, watchable Die Hard analogs go, this is well done, even if you do see the big twist coming long before Frank does. But what makes the ﬁlm impressive in its own right is the way that the movie treats deaf people.

Frank and Ava are not helpless, nor are they inspiration porn. Though their deafness makes their plight and fight more difficult in some cases, it is an advantage in one important scene, and for the most part, it’s just part of their lived experiences, as everyone deals with their own abilities and limits. In the movie’s core scene, Ava forcefully tells Frank that he can and should mourn his lost hearing, but that he is still a whole person, not a damaged or partial one. It’s probably the most eloquent expression of disabled dignity and personhood I’ve ever seen in a genre film. That’s a low bar, but it’s very much worth clearing.

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It would be nice if a cop ﬁlm about deafness grappled with the horriﬁc police record on disability; half of the people killed by police in Illinois are disabled, as just one data point. But there are limits to what you can expect from a pulp action drama. In most respects, The Silent Hour quietly provides a blueprint for better

In the iconically ultraviolent Ichi the Killer, a sadomasochist tells an attacker, “There’s no love in your violence.” No one can accuse Terriﬁer creator and gore maestro Damien Leone of not having love in his violence. The unadulterated joy of the increasingly absurd mutilations that Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) subjects his victims to in Terriﬁer 3 is o en just as infectious as it is sickening.

Variations on head splittings, fun with liquid nitrogen, an extended chainsaw sequence, and more keep the incredible practical gore interesting and, dare I say, innovative. But it’s Leone’s talent for tone control and his ability to shi from that chaotic, blood-soaked joy into a horrifying, blood-soaked hopelessness that makes Terriﬁer 3 work as more than a special eﬀects exhibition.

The film picks up five years and a few months a er Terrifier 2, shi ing the holiday from Halloween to Christmas. Final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) leaves a psychiatric hospital to move in with extended family while the unkillable Art engages in Christmas hijinks on his way to her. When they finally meet, the delirious ecstasy of Art’s antics curdles into a genuinely unnerving, character-centered horror.

That horror only works because LaVera and her fellow castmates, especially Elliott Fullam as her little brother Jonathan, sell the love between their characters. The rattling fear that Terriﬁer 3 generates isn’t born of its carnage—it comes from its emotional cruelty. Seeing anyone eviscerated is disturbing; seeing a loved one tortured to death is something else.

Terrifier 3 doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its predecessor, mostly because it offers answers to the almost mythical questions that Terrifier 2 introduced. But the film’s shi ing registers, and a subplot indicting the inhumanity of true crime as entertainment, make it another must-watch for extreme horror fans. —KYLE LOGAN R, 125 min. Wide release in theaters v

Terriﬁer 3 JESSE KORMAN/DARK AGE CINEMA VIA LA TIMES

The Silent Hour PARAMOUNT PICTURES

The occult is so baked into hard rock and heavy metal that you can forget that the combination was once new, misunderstood, and even feared. Black Sabbath and Mercyful Fate are often credited with mainstreaming occultism in rock, but its roots go back further—to Chicago band Coven.

Teenage singer Jinx Dawson founded the band in Indianapolis in the mid-60s with bassist Greg “Oz” Osborne and drummer Steve Ross. Dawson came from a wealthy and inﬂuential family (her grandfather served as lieutenant governor of Indiana in the early 40s), and she had relatives in secret societies devoted to left-hand path occultism. The lefthand path (sometimes called “black magic”) often operates via defiance of dogma and taboo, and the rebellious young Dawson became fascinated. By her teens, she dreamed of pairing her love of music with her interest in witchcraft and storytelling.

Coven’s 1969 debut LP, Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls , recorded with Chicago producer Bill Traut, turned heads with its music and its occult themes. The inner gatefold photo depicts a group of cloaked men—including members of Traut’s Chicagobased coven—hovering around Dawson, who sprawls nude on an altar. The 13-minute ﬁnal track is an alleged Black Mass, written by Traut and informed by elements of the band’s live shows.

Shops and distributors were immediately leery, and after the Tate-LaBianca murders that summer, hysteria about malign occult inﬂuence in the counterculture all but sealed the album’s fate—Coven had been spuriously linked to Charles Manson, and skittish record labels pulled Witchcraft from shelves.

The question of whether Coven inﬂuenced Black Sabbath is a debate that continues to this day, but when Witchcraft came out—with a lead track called “Black Sabbath”—the UK band was still called Earth and had nothing to do with the occult. Even after changing their name, they weren’t blacklisted in the same way that Coven was.

Meanwhile, Dawson recorded “One Tin Soldier” with session players for the 1971 ﬁlm Billy Jack, which became a surprise hit. A new version of Coven that she’d assembled in Los Angeles released a self-titled album that same year. They put out one more LP, 1974’s Blood on the Snow, and split up.

In 2013, Coven returned with Jinx, their ﬁrst album of new material in nearly four decades, and in 2017 the band coheadlined the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Netherlands. Since

Wherever Jinx Dawson travels, she brings

“Skully” and her coﬃ n. She says she’s slept in the coﬃ n all over the world.

MATTHEW AFFELTRANGER

Jinx Dawson speaks on the legacy of Coven

Fi y-ﬁve years ago, her band endured backlash and hysteria to light a ﬂame for all the occult rock to come.

By JAMIE LUDWIG

then they’ve toured Europe and the Americas, and this year they’re celebrating the 55th anniversary of Witchcraft. The band’s current roster—Dawson, Alex Kercheval, Colin Oakley, Chris Vaughn, and Zayne Hutchison—are recording new material for a Prophecy Productions album planned for 2025.

On October 18, the Witchcraft single “Wicked Woman” will appear in the ﬁfth episode of

Hysteria!, a new Peacock TV series set in the fictional Happy Hollow, Michigan. Coven’s story is “stitched into the fabric of the show,” according to writer and executive producer Matthew Scott Kane. “I knew that the central storyline would take place in the satanic panic of the 80s, but that its themes and subject matter gave us the potential to tell stories in just about every decade—with the ripest of

OCCULT

which being the Summer of Love, 1969, when Witchcraft was first released,” Kane says. “Decades before the forebears of heavy metal took on the Moral Majority, Coven was blazing a devilishly groovy trail for them.”

This interview with Dawson has been edited for length and clarity.

Almost every week I find out new stuff [about my family], because I’m on Ancestry. The thing just keeps growing and growing. I’m shocked—one of the bloodlines goes back to, like, 900 or something.

My two great-aunts were spinsters. They lived with my great-grandfather in this really huge, beautiful Italianate mansion [in Indianapolis]. There was a farm around it, and there were workers who lived on the property. My grandfather built a house about a block away. The place was like a fantasy world, and I thought it was normal until it was gone. When I was 13, they tore the mansion down and they put up a strip mall—a strip mall. I was just sick.

“Keystone” is a magical word. I don’t know if you know that. One of the roads there is still called Keystone. It goes on for miles, and there’s a graveyard where a lot of my people are buried. My father, who became a builder after World War II, had built a house for himself and his new wife—my mother—about a block away [from the mansion], but it was all farmland. I could look out the window and see [the mansion]. One time I even made the newspaper. They thought I’d been kidnapped or something, but I was hiding at the mansion under a bed.

There were Obeah women who worked there. I had a nanny who was a young Obeah girl of around 19 or 20. We’d go ﬁshing together—we were right next to a river called White River—and I’d be at the mansion more than my own crummy little house, hanging out with my great-aunts.

There was a big library, and it had tons of magic books. You had to climb up steps to get up to them. I remember my grandfather saying, “You’re not allowed up there.” So of course I went. [My relatives] had meetings and ceremonies in this mansion. I’d watch from the other house and see all these cars pull in, these big, fat 50s cars, thinking, “What’s going on there?” Because I wasn’t allowed there after a certain time of day.

As a baby they had me doing the sign of the horns, just for the fun of it. They’d go, “Hold your ﬁngers like that,” and I didn’t really know what it was. Then ﬁnally one night I snuck over.

OCCULT

continued from p. 31

I was maybe seven or eight. The door was open—what they call a storm door, for when you have tornadoes and you go underneath the house. I was hiding in the bushes, and I kept seeing people come out of these cars. They’d do the sign of the horns, and the other person would do it back to them.

“As a baby they had me doing the sign of the horns, just for the fun of it. They’d go, ‘Hold your fingers like that,’ and I didn’t really know what it was.”

It’s not a mano cornuta, like in Italy, where they point the ﬁngers at the eyes of little kids and say “be good.” In the sign of the horns, you hold the two middle fingers down and other ones up, and it looks kind of like a goat in the shadows. It meant that they’re in the secret society, almost like a secret handshake. That’s what it means: “You’re one of us.”

So [in Coven] I started doing that onstage. I ﬁgured nobody would even know or care what it was. The peace sign was “in” when we started playing in 1968 or ’67, so people thought it was kind of a weird, bastardized version of that.

When I was 13 years old, I won two scholarships, one at Herron art school and one at Butler opera school. I wanted to do a scholarly witchcraft [record]—with informational stories and things that I had heard and a Black Mass—and I found a Chicago producer who wanted to do it.

I was already working with Bill Traut, singing on advertisements, going up to Chicago at age 16 or 17 to record that kind of stuff with him. He wanted me to be in this band he was doing called the Hardy Boys. I said, “No. I’m working on a band called Coven. I want to do this witchcraft thing.” He said, “Oh, I’m into that.”

Bill waited until I was out of high school, because my parents and the relatives weren’t going to let me go anywhere until I graduated. So after I graduated in 1968, when I was 18, I moved to Chicago with the band. I can’t remember our exact address, but it was 13-something Dearborn Avenue—right behind the Playboy Mansion.

I’d already been in garage bands, as most everybody starts that way. I’d already played with the Jefferson Airplane, opened for the Who, and I had the opera scholarships. I just wanted to meld the singing with the information of the occult, because it really wasn’t out there. I wasn’t really thinking of it being a commercial thing. The family had money, so I wasn’t doing it for a paycheck or anything.

Bill had a big company up in Chicago called

Dunwich, a production company that had Shadows of Knight and other big bands. He had Crow—Black Sabbath happened to do a Crow song on Yuggoth Music, which was our publishing company. [Editor’s note: Black Sabbath debuted in 1970 with a UK single on which they covered the Crow song “Evil Woman,” published by Yuggoth, which was affiliated with Dunwich.]

People from Black Sabbath say, “We don’t have a connection. We didn’t know about Coven.” Well, excuse me, but they did. We recorded in Chicago all through ’68, and Witchcraft came out in the summer before Black Sabbath. When [ Witchcraft ] was released, it immediately got banned. I mean, it had the nude picture inside and all this stuff. We played a lot of shows at first, around Chicago and Detroit. We had a Jesus on a cross, and he’d get off and invert it. The audiences would just sit there after the show. I’d think, “We’ve gotta get out of here—these people are going to kill us.” But they’d applaud after a minute. They’d never seen anything like it.

People don’t understand that now, because so much came after us—like a flood—and they’re like, “Who’s Coven?” Well, I hate to say, guys. We made the path for you. Now, [occult rock] is all about the girls. Back then, they didn’t think it was right for a little wholesome blonde-headed girl to be doing that stuff. I really, honestly think that was a part of it.

they had our record under the counter in Chicago. Then they had them wrapped in brown paper.

Then they weren’t there at all. That’s why we ended up in LA. In the meantime, the record label that Black Sabbath was on, Vertigo, was part of Mercury Records. “Black Sabbath” was the first song on our album. They chose the name “Black Sabbath” for that band, and I’m telling you, I feel bad for them. They don’t want to tell the truth, but that’s the truth. They’re already rich. Why do they care?

So our influence is everywhere, without people knowing. People write to me and say,

After we got banned, Jinx Dawson in Los Angeles in 1971

“Well, you didn’t know Ronnie James Dio.” Excuse me, but our drummer [Steve Ross] played with Rainbow for a bit—he didn’t go out with them, but he was trying out for Rainbow. And we knew Ronnie Dio because we used to go to the Rainbow Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. All the rockers went there, and we were friends with those guys. We didn’t just come out of the woodwork. [Editor’s note: Dio has been widely credited with popularizing the sign of the horns in heavy metal in the 70s.] Back [in the late 60s], there was an actor doing talking records, and there were records coming out on different stuff, like astrology. We were definitely not psychedelic, in my mind, or hippies, though they put us in [that box]. We’re not exactly heavy metal either. Our sound is more classical, operatic, and musical. I was trying to tell stories of things that I knew about as a child. I wanted to come out with the darker side of the human brain: What are we here for? Why are we here? What happened in history?

The history part of witchcraft really fascinates me. I’m related, direct bloodline, to Louis XV. And [he was] into witchcraft and all sorts of things. I don’t know if bloodline lines mean that much, but it sure seems like they could. I have a relative that was born in the [place] in the song lyrics of “Black Sabbath”—she lived at the bottom of “Brocken mountain pinnacle.”

So I wanted to tell the story, because it was so fantastic. Because of this damn beautiful mansion and the way we lived. They’d bury people right there behind the house in the cornfields. There was a thing I think was built to watch out for [people fleeing enslavement], like a lighthouse thing. My babysitter Liza and I used to get to it in the kitchen. You’d open the cupboard, take out the dishes, and there were steps there that went all the way up. When I was finally allowed to come over at night, we’d go up and look out. We thought the ghosts of the people buried in the cornﬁelds

ALLAN PARACHINI

were going to dance around—we were just girls—and when the corn is dried and standing there, it kind of looks like people.

It was just an incredible fantasy situation that I never saw in a movie or a TV show or anything, so I thought, “I’ll share this.” And in my sharing, I got slammed back. It’s kind of sad, but they always say the one that takes the ﬁrst footsteps usually gets hurt.

Charles Manson bought a copy of Witchcraft at Tower Records, and somebody took a picture of him. That didn’t help at all. We had no connection with him. I never met him—I’d

“People from Black Sabbath say, ‘We don’t have a connection. We didn’t know about Coven.’ Well, excuse me, but they did.”

never even been to San Francisco. Anything that [Dunwich and Mercury had] distributed got banned. We really didn’t know how big these bands coming up behind us were going to get—we ﬁgured they’d probably get banned too.

But here’s a fluke thing: We played with Frank Zappa in Indianapolis in 1970. He was doing this jokey thing and joking with the audience, and they were kind of booing him. So he got ticked o , and the second night he let us be the main thing and he opened for us. He went back to California, but he got hold of

us, because all of his band members said, “Oh, we’ve got to be a band like Coven. That’s really cool.” So he’s the one that made us come out to California.

We went into his practice studio that had Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles and these other famous kinda pop-country bands. We were so afraid we were going to lose our equipment that we put a big sheet over the door [with] inverted crosses on it. These people never saw that before.

This man [Tom Laughlin], who was producing this movie called Billy Jack , wanted Linda Ronstadt to record this song “One Tin Soldier,” and she didn’t want to. I took the session gig, thinking, “I need money for the band.” Even though I had parents that were rich, I didn’t borrow from them—I wanted to make it on my own. I ﬁgured it’s just a movie title song. I got paid $2,000, and I rented a really nice house in the hills overlooking Hollywood.

Then a few months later, I went down to Hollywood Boulevard and picked up a Billboard at the newsstand. The song was ﬂ ying up the charts. The guy wanted me to use my name, but I never wanted to be a solo artist—I always wanted to have a band—so I pushed for “Coven” on there. I probably shouldn’t have. People were like, “How come you’re doing this kind of music?” We really weren’t. It wasn’t anything we wrote, and it was a ﬂuke that it was such a big hit three years in a row. So all these people who were starting to make a lot of money with their occult-type music turned on us: “Yeah, they really weren’t into it.” I was in Hollywood with a band, and I had to feed them—I did what I had to do.

In 1974 we ﬁnally got to do what we wanted to do again. I can write a rock song, and it doesn’t have to be about the occult, but I came back to it with Blood on the Snow . We actually did what I think people consider the ﬁrst music video—videos weren’t really happening yet in ’74. Disney [produced] it. What’s funny is that their logo is on the end of the tape I have, but after they found out what Coven was, they didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Now they have horror movies! It’s been a weird ride.

I came back to Indianapolis in the early 2000s. My dad got sick with cancer, and I was with him for a long, long time trying to keep him well. So the band was all broken up, and I got stuck here, and I put a new band together. We just had the 55th celebration of Witchcraft , and I actually had the two guys that were on the album take a picture with me. They showed up, and we did like a mock kind of cover and the back cover for people—I dragged them

onstage. They loved it, and the new band loved it too. The new band is really, really great—I lucked out meeting people here.

These days, it’s actually a lot of younger people [who come to our shows]. It’s shocking. These people have looked into the history of the band, and they’ve learned all our stu . A kid flew in from California for the 55th deal. He’s 21 years old. I hugged him really good. People aren’t afraid of [the occult] anymore. My great-aunts did not want me to do the album or even let any of this information loose at all. They were very, very angry about it. In fact, they wrote me out of the will because of it. Now things have changed; I don’t know that they wanted it that way.

Think about witch burning. Torturing so-called witches—and most of them really probably weren’t witches—has been going on forever. They’ve always gone against people that thought a different way. You know, lefthand path, or if they went against religion. I think now people are more receptive, which is really good. v

m jludwig@chicagoreader.com

L: Coven perform at Metro on Halloween 2017. R: The cover of Coven’s 1969 debut LP METRO PHOTO BY JAMIE LUDWIG

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of October 17

PICK OF THE WEEK

Chicago alt-country eccentrics Souled American play their first shows in 13 years behind two overdue reissues

SOULED AMERICAN

Opening acts to be announced. Fri 10/18 and Sat 10/19, 8 PM, Judson & Moore, 3057 N. Rockwell, both shows sold out (waiting list available from $32.96). 21+

CHICAGO COUNTRY ECCENTRICS Souled American were ahead of the curve when it came to reimagining country music in the language of alternative rock. So ahead of the curve, in fact, that they seemed to exist apart from the contemporaneous No Depression scene, named after Uncle Tupelo’s 1990 debut album and bustling with indie Americana acts. In retrospect it’s easy to see Souled American as a rogue phenomenon, too idiosyncratic to belong to any movement—an impression underlined by their modest record sales, which have limited the number of folks who can even remember the band. Souled American have undeniably influenced the likes of Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) and John Darnielle (Mountain Goats), but until recently it was easier to ﬁnd their thoughts on Souled American than it was to ﬁnd the band’s albums. The group started digitally reissuing their back catalog last year, which has vastly improved the accessibility of their inimitable songs. Their music can be twangy and jumpy or undulating and glacial, but it always rewards deep listening. If you give it that kind of attention, I suspect you’ll understand why Robin Hurley of Rough Trade, upon encountering Souled American in Austin, Texas, in 1987, decided the band could help the storied UK label make inroads in America’s indie world.

Souled American bassist-vocalist Joe Adducci and guitarist-vocalist Chris Grigoro grew up in downstate Charleston, Illinois, and in the mid-1980s they played in a ska band called the Uptown Rulers. (“I don’t like to think about it much,” Adducci told Reader writer Bill Wyman in 1990.) For their next band, Adducci and Grigoro wanted to bring a dub sensibility to country music, and in 1986 guitarist Scott Tuma and drummer Jamey Barnard completed the Souled American lineup. In 1988, Rough Trade issued their rangy debut, Fe, and over the next four years Souled American released three more albums for the label: 1989’s Flubber, 1990’s Around the Horn, and 1992’s covers album Sonny (which Rough Trade distributed only in Europe). Barnard left the band before Sonny, and because Souled American didn’t replace him, their complex sound drifted away from the funky swampiness of Fe and grew more

contemplative and atmospheric: 1994’s Frozen and 1996’s Notes Campfire, both issued by German label Moll, employ guest drummers on only a couple tracks apiece. The latter album includes Tuma’s last contributions to the band, and since then, Souled American have largely been dormant. For decades now, Adducci and Grigoro have been working intermittently on a new album.

On October 4, Souled American released their first new song in 18 years, “Sorry State,” whose scu ed-up vocals lope and dip with as much character as anything in the band’s back catalog. These two shows at Judson & Moore distillery are the band’s first live performances in 13 years, and they coincide with expansive new reissues of Frozen and Notes Campfire by Oklahoma label Scissor Tail Records. The latter opens with “Before Tonight,” a song that Tweedy said he wished he’d written in a 2019 Pitchfork interview: “I just think it’s beautiful.” Tweedy is among a throng of high-profile fans whose advocacy might dovetail with the band’s reemergence to establish Souled American’s rightful place in alternative country history. —LEOR GALIL

THURSDAY17

Erica Dawn Lyle Ben Zucker opens. 8:30 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15, $10 students. b

Erica Dawn Lyle’s creativity has always been ﬂuid. Many people first heard her when she joined the reunited Bikini Kill as a touring guitarist in 2019, but she’s a longtime mainstay of punk, DIY, and activist scenes. She’s been organizing and playing underground shows since she was a teenager in the early 90s, and she’s used those connections to help realize numerous fundraising albums. Most recently, she teamed up with drummer Vice Cooler for 2022’s Land Trust: Benefit for NEFOC , which harnessed musical talents as diverse as Kim Gordon, Brontez Purnell, and the Linda Lindas to raise money for a northeastern farming collective fighting for land sovereignty.

Lyle’s curiosity and output also extend well beyond music. Based in New York and Florida, she’s an avid writer who’s contributed art criticism to outlets such as Artforum and Art in America and authored a memoir on art and gentrification in the wake of the anti-globalization movement, and since 1991 she’s published a zine about art, punk, crime, and DIY living called Scam . She’s also dabbled in making films, curating art shows, and hosting poetry readings. Her disparate experiences have kept her in a constant state of evolution that’s been nurtured by the flexibility of antiauthoritiarian subcultures. In recent years, Lyle has been touring and recording as an improvising guitarist. In the album notes to 1221/E-m-p-i-r-e-d-e-a-t-h, which documents an October 2023 concert in Ithaca, New York, she describes the concert as crystallizing a liberatory shi in her approach that she continues to pursue today. She had transitioned from playing the guitar to experiencing her body and her instrument unified as a conduit for the room’s atmosphere. She lik-

COURTESY TOM ADELMAN

Erica Dawn Lyle RAYNA ZEMEL

MUSIC

ens herself to “an ancient transistor radio” that you might turn on to “see what sounds come swirling in.” In June, Lyle released a cassette called Colonial Motels (Notice Recordings), whose two songs she recorded last summer over two days at the warehouse arts and performance space of friend and organizer Jonas Fricke, who’d just passed. The music is nervous, spacey, and sad—exactly how you’d expect a human radio to sound when it picks up signals of grief and memory. It’s anyone’s guess what vibe she’ll channel at her Elastic Arts debut—how her instrument sings will depend on what you bring to the room.

—MICCO CAPORALE

FRIDAY18

Souled American See Pick of the Week on page 34. See also Sat 10/19. Opening act to be announced. 8 PM, Judson & Moore, 3057 N. Rockwell, sold out (waiting list available). 21+

SATURDAY19

Heart Trio 7 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $25. 21+

William Parker, Hamid Drake, and Cooper-Moore are the Heart Trio. They’ve just released their self- titled debut album on Aum Fidelity, but they have decades of shared history. Drake and Parker, since ﬁrst recording together on the 1993 Peter Brötzmann album Die Like a Dog (just reissued on vinyl by Cien Fuegos), have evolved a dynamism that’s made them one of the premier drummerand- bassist teams in free-leaning jazz. Parker has been working even longer with pianist and instrument inventor Cooper-Moore, and since 2012, the three of them have been the core of Parker’s band In Order to Survive. In that combo, whose most recent local performance was at the 2022 Chicago

Jazz Festival, Cooper-Moore plays keyboards, but in the Heart Trio, everyone sets aside their most familiar instruments and takes up musical tools of talismanic significance. Parker plays donso ngoni, a harplike West African instrument first popularized in improvised music by Don Cherry; bass duduk, a traditional Armenian double reed; and a collection of flutes from around the world. Drake sticks to frame drum and a much-reduced drum kit, and Cooper-Moore plays two instruments he made himself: a hoe-handle harp and an 11-tone xylophone he’s named the ashimba (a combination of “marimba” and his original surname, Ashton). It’s easy to throw around the term “world music” when players turn to instruments from around the globe, but the Heart Trio aren’t looking to re-create styles from other cultures. For their purposes, these instruments represent the best that the world and their own imaginations have to offer, and the three of them use their bright and woody tones to improvise relaxed, endlessly permutating rhythms and intricate, interwoven melodies. Never mind world music; these deeply hypnotic voyages are music of a better world. —BILL MEYER

Souled American See Pick of the Week on page 34. See also Fri 10/18. Opening act to be announced. 8 PM, Judson & Moore, 3057 N. Rockwell, sold out (waiting list available). 21+

SUNDAY20

Poison Ruïn Double Over, Youth in Asia, and Scare Tactics open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+

I’m no expert, but I’d bet that Philadelphia dungeonpunk outﬁt Poison Ruïn are having more fun screwing around with medieval fantasy tropes than anybody since Monty Python went searching for the Holy Grail. On the cover of the self-titled 2022

Poison Ruïn CECIL SHANG WHALEY

MUSIC

continued from p. 35

release that combines their first two EPs, two knights wield spiked flails and hold shields they might’ve bought at a head shop; le knight’s shield has a peace sign on it (talk about mixed messages!), while right knight’s has a yin-yang symbol. Poison Ruïn began in 2020 as a solo recording outlet for guitarist-vocalist Mac Kennedy, but the project soon evolved into a four-piece. By the time they got signed to Relapse for the lo-ﬁ 2023 album Härvest, they’d established themselves as a killer live band, playing an irresistible blend of anarcho-punk, hardcore, garage rock, dungeon synth, and more. Kennedy’s lyrics about peasant revolts, court jesters, and torture chambers could be mistaken as Renaissance-fair nonsense, but he uses them to create metaphors for modern-day class struggles and political crises—which fuels the vital urgency of the songs.

Poison Ruïn continue their irreligious crusade on August’s Confrere. The seven-song EP lasts just 20 minutes, and not a second is wasted—not even the instrumental synth intro, which could’ve come straight from an 80s sword-andsorcery B movie. The surfy garagerock licks and vivid storytelling of the title track recall Radio Birdman, while its lyrics turn it into a bleak battlefield cry for camaraderie and brotherly love unto death. The crusty “Laid Waste” sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a rat-infested well, and its blistering D-beat riffs open up into a loose, ferocious gallop. The triumphant punk rager “Execute” conjures images of gleeful homeward-bound warriors playing catch with the skulls of their enemies: “Oﬀ with their heads,” goes its refrain. “We’re fucking oﬀ with their heads.” It’s a class-war victory dance that ought to put the fear of Poison Ruïn into our most nefarious tech lords and wannabe autocrats. —JAMIE LUDWIG

TUESDAY22

Ulna TV Buddha and Sports Boyfriend (solo) open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12. 21+

While writing his second album under the name Ulna, Chicago singer-guitarist Adam Schubert contemplated his upbringing in suburban Northbrook, but the romantic dreariness that hangs over Gazebo (out last month on Shuga) sounds indebted to the indie rock of the Pacific Northwest. The scruffy warmth of Schubert’s arrangements contrasts with his occasionally irascible guitar chords, which hit with the bracing intensity of a gust of chilly autumn wind. His singing is generally relaxed and gentle, but it conceals a biting edge. He can flit from tender to angry in seconds, which can make him sound wounded and vulnerable—he’s not angry at you, though, so the effect is as if he’s beckoning

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you to come closer as he reveals more of himself. Schubert’s detailed lyrics are unsentimental about the time in his life when he was a self-described “bad kid,” but his yearning vocals, heightened in emotion by his sharply articulated guitar lines, extend empathy to the person he used to be—and to anyone who may ﬁnd something of themselves in his words. —LEOR GALIL

Rafael Toral Daniel Wyche opens. 8 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15, $10 students. b

Plenty has changed in Rafael Toral’s music throughout his career, but cross-fertilization and collisions of disparate methodologies have been constants. In the 1990s, the Lisbon-born artist made mostly guitar- based music, devising his own aesthetic from a starting point in the pure, resonant sound shared by American minimalists Phill Niblock and

Alvin Lucier, like-minded Chicago experimentalist Jim O’Rourke, and rockers My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. During the next decade, he abandoned guitars (and largely abandoned droning, continuous tones) in order to develop a jazzinformed improvisational language called the Space Program, using homemade and hot-wired electronics to interact with expanses of silence and turbulent free-jazz rhythms. On his latest album, February’s Spectral Evolution , he employs every tool and sound he’s mastered over the decades to realize a long-form composition. Its complex arrangements might sound like a discourse between jungle birds, mid-20th-century sci-ﬁ movie sound eﬀects, and jazz guitar, but it’s inspired by the exquisitely framed orchestrations of Billie Holiday’s large-band performances.

Toral plays every instrument on the album, and it took him several years to conceive and then record the piece. During that process, he turned to O’Rourke for input. O’Rourke was so impressed by what he heard that he resurrected his Moikai label—responsible for the 1999 stateside release of Toral’s 1994 debut album, Sound Mind Sound Body to put it out. Spectral Evolution features dozens of tracks of guitar, bass, and electronics, so to perform it live, Toral has remixed most of the piece to play through a multitrack surround-sound system while he plays electric guitar. “This means I’m clashing the culture of electronic acousmatic music with that of strict instrumental performance,” Toral explained via email. “It works well in the end, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it.” An ensemble led by local guitarist Daniel Wyche opens the concert. —BILL MEYER v

Rafael Toral VERA MARMELO Adam Schubert of Ulna ALEXA VISCIUS

The members of the Heart Trio: William Parker, Cooper-Moore, and Hamid Drake PHOTOS BY JIMMY KATZ (PARKER), CLARE O’DEA (COOPER-MOORE), AND PETER GANNUSHKIN (DRAKE)

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UI Health – University Health Service -Clinical Practice Data Analyst Coordinator Univ Health Service, at the Univ of IL College of Medicine Chicago (UIC), located in a large metropolitan area, is seeking full-time Clinical Practice Data Analyst Coordinator to assist the department with the following responsibilities: Under direction and supervision, conduct full clinical data analysis to include requirements, activities, and design; Develop analysis and reporting capabilities and monitor performance and quality control plans to identify improvements; Facilitate evaluation and improvement of quality performance by presenting complex information in an understandable and compelling manner customized to the audience; Collaborate with clinicians and senior leaders to design and perform more complex analyses, database design development, and report creation; Develop project-specific data management goals that address areas such as data analytic updates, reporting, and work-flow processes; Design or create merged data files and/or warehouse data sets to provide easy customer access to an integrated repository of clinical, financial, and demographic data supporting the health system’s analysis, planning, and improvement needs; Identify methods to streamline and automate data upload process to increase the speed of reporting results and to reduce errors; Utilize specialized knowledge of healthcare data analytics to perform tasks; Supervise the orientation and work performance of lower-level staff; Perform other duties and participate in special projects as assigned. Some periodic travel may be required for local travel in between worksite locations. This position minimally requires a Bachelor’s degree or its foreign equivalent in Healthcare Information; Healthcare Economics; Health Outcomes, Policy & Economics; Statistics; Finance; or related field of study; and 2 yrs of data analyst or data management work experience in a clinical or healthcare related field... For fullest consideration, please submit CV, cover letter, and 3 professional references by 11/4/2024 to Shanelle Brandon, University of IL Chicago, University Health Services, 835 South Wolcott Street, Suite E144, Chicago, IL 60612 or via email to shanelle@ uic.edu UIC is an Equal

Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans, & individuals w/ disabilities are encouraged to apply. UIC may conduct background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer letter. Background checks will be performed in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As a qualifying federal contractor, the University of Illinois System uses E-Verify to verify employment eligibility. The University of Illinois System requires candidates selected for hire to disclose any documented ﬁnding of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment and to authorize inquiries to current and former employers regarding findings of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment. For more information, visit https://www.hr.uillinois. edu/cms/One.aspx? portalId=4292&page Id=1411899 University of Illinois faculty, staff and students are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. If you are not able to receive the vaccine for medical or religious reasons, you may seek approval for an exemption in accordance with applicable University processes.

Pediatric Dentist Pediatric Dental Associates, P.C. in Buﬀalo Grove, IL seeks a Pediatric Dentist to provide dentistry to children, adolescents, & individ w/ special needs. A speciality license is req’d w/ additional 2 yrs after obtaining a degree as a lic’d gen’l dentist. DDS & Pediatric Dental Speciality Residency w/3 yrs as a Pediatric Dentist. Travel req’d in state of Illinois. Salary of $158,400 to $211,200 w/ potential for additional compensation based on mo production. Res: HR, 195 N. Arlington Heights Road, Buﬀalo Grove, IL 60089

TECHNICAL Cisco Systems, Inc. is accepting resumes for multiple positions in Chicago, IL: Business Analysis Manager (Ref#: CHI153D): Analyze business requirement to configure rule management and define systems solution. Telecommuting permitted. Technical Solutions Architect (Ref#: CHI313D): Responsible for IT advisory and technical consulting services development and delivery. Telecommuting permitted and travel may be required to various unanticipated locations throughout the United States. Please email resumes including position’s reference number in subject line to Cisco Systems, Inc.

at amsjobs@cisco.com. No phone calls please. Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship. EOE. www.cisco.com

Wood Dale, IL) K.R. KOMAREK Inc. seeks Manager, Technical Services w/ Bach or for deg equiv in mech eng or rel ﬂd & 3 yrs exp in job offer or ind mtrl handl incl ISO9001:2015 found & ind mach indus in mng role. Freq dom & occ intl trvl req. Apply to HR 548 Clayton Ct, Wood Dale, IL 60191 or https://komarek. com/about-komarek/ komarek-careers

Medline Industries, LP in Northfield, IL has multi opn’gs: A) Sr. IS Business Systems Analyst(s) to drive the dsgn & delivery of quality techncl solt’ns. No trvl req’d. WFH benefit avail; must be onsite at least 2 days/wk. Apply at: https://medline. wd5.myworkdayjobs. com/Medline/job/ Northfield-Illinois/SrIT-Business-SystemsAnalyst_R2404644; B) Sr. Business Systems Analyst(s) to determine bus reqmnts & translate to systm reqmnts in HCM & Payroll modules & Kronos for time & attendance. No trvl req’d. WFH beneﬁt avail. Apply at: https://medline. wd5.myworkdayjobs. com/Medline/job/ Northfield-Illinois/ Sr-Business-SystemsAnalyst_R2404646

Enterprise Architect Contextant, Inc seeks an Enterprise Architect in Bolingbrook, IL to create and maintain product roadmaps. Req. BS + 5 yrs. in job offered or as Enterprise Integration Architect; prior experience must include experience developing digital transformation technologies for Warehouse Management, Automation Systems, and Order and Inventory Management utilizing IOT, Advanced Data Analytics, AI, ML and Cloud Solutions provided by Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft Azure; performing technical cloud architecture, solution and integration architecture, network management, application development using Spring, Java/ J2EE, Hibernate, Javascript; performing middleware design using Apache tomcat or IBM Websphere application servers, information and data analysis, database management using MySQL, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server & operations management

in a heterogeneous environment. To apply: submit resume via email to careers@contextant. com Must ref. Job Title: Enterprise Architect.

The X Pot Chicago LLC is seeking a Business Analyst to collect primary and secondary data from industry reports; Building, updating, and maintaining databases to store current operation data and etc. Position requires a Master’s Degree in Business Intelligence or related field, knowledge of database security, etc. Any interested applicants can mail their resume with code XP24 to: The X Pot Chicago LLC. 1147 S Delano Ct East., Chicago, IL 60605.

MSDSOnline Inc., D/B/A VelocityEHS: Chicago, IL: Vice President, Research and Machine Learning: Dvlp. strategy of VelocityEHS re: application of machine learning (ML) in EHS + ESG software solutions. Telecommuting permitted. Need Ph.D. in Electrical + Computer Engg, plus 8 yrs. of post-grad. exp. in electrical + computer engg., incl. ML. Exp. must also incl. 2 yrs. of exp. leading ML scientists + 1 yr. of ﬁeld (boots on the ﬂoor) exp. in industrial environment for exposure to environmental, health + safety (EHS) risks. Must have a record of peer-reviewed publications. Need legal auth. to work indef. in U.S. Email resumes to lsteigerwalt@ehs.com.

Senior Analytics Engineer Bounteous Inc. seeks a Senior Analytics Engineer (#B004) in Chicago, IL: Develop domain expertise in clients’ business space to drive results. Demonstrate grasp of fundamental importance of clean data to empower successful digital marketing initiatives, in support of larger business objectives. Telecommuting is permitted. Send resumes to Daniel Johnson (Daniel. Johnson@bounteous. com) & must reference Job title and Job #B004 in subject line.

Morningstar, Inc. seeks a Senior Data Specialist, Level II (multiple positions) in Chicago, IL to track, evaluate, & determine resolution approach for complex data issues that escalate from Level I teams (Product Support, Client Service Consultant) (18%). BS in Comp Sci, Comp Engg, or rltd engg ﬁeld & 2 yrs of rltd data specialist exp req’d. Add’l speciﬁc skills req’d. For position details & to apply, visit: https://www.morning-

star.com/careers; ref. job ID REQ-047487.

Market Research Analyst in Bolingbrook IL. Must have Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing or Marketing Analytics. 2 yrs of exp. Prepare marketing research reports, analyze data, and summarize market trends. Gather data on competitors and analyze their prices and sales; gather and analyze data on customer demographics, preferences, needs, and buying habits. Get to know the trends in the logistics and warehouse industry; forecast, track and report marketing and sales trends, analyze data. Other tasks as assigned. Send resume to: Cargowill, LLC 1325 Remington Blvd Ste B, Bolingbrook, IL 60490.

Senior VDC Manager (Master’s w/ 5 yrs exp or Bach w/ 7 yrs exp; Majors: Architecture or equiv) - Chicago, IL. Job entails working w/ & reqs exp in BIM incl: developing design documents & reviewing constructability; assisting in coordinating production team, building systems, code authorities, & specs; maintaining project cost estimates; coordinating bidding process; on-site observation; project management, business development; Revit, AutoCAD, BIM360, Navisworks, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Dynamo; VR, BIM, Digital Twins, AI. Various worksites: relocation or occasional travel to project-based unanticipated worksites within the USA possible. Send resumes to VIATechnik LLC, Attn: HR, 200 E Randolph, Suite 5400, Chicago, IL 60601

Research Engineer Aquatic Group is seeking a Research Engineer in Chicago, IL. Develop software for researchers using Python and C++. Must live within normal commuting distance of worksite. Must be in office 4 days per week. May work remotely on Fridays. Email resume to HR@Aquatic.com and reference code 2255 in subject line.

Risk Analyst Federal Home Loan Bank Chicago is seeking a Risk Analyst in Chicago, IL. Analyze loan characteristics and credit risk features from key data. Remote work allowed up to 40% of time. Apply on-line at fhlbc.com/careers.

Director of Enrollment Marketing, Chicago Plan & execute print & digital ad campaigns, marketing strategies; monitor performance.

Meet w/ clients, conduct research, monitor budgets. Write, proof content. Bachelor’s in marketing analytics, comms, closely related, 5 yrs exp. req. Mail res, cov let to Melissa Munoz-Rush, Manager, HR, Illinois Institute of Technology, 10 W 35th St., Ste. 1300, Chicago, IL 60616.

PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES

CLEANING SERVICES

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

Psychiatric and Mental Health Services At BrainBody, our mission is to establish and maintain a practice that provides medication management, therapeutic interventions focusing on whole health and lifestyle medicine to guide adults on a path to mental and physical health. Accepting new patients, in network with BCBS, Cigna, Optum, and Aetna. Email: support@ brainbody.health

Phix Your Body So It Can Fix Itself Did you know your body has the innate ability to fix itself? But not if vital organs are surrounded by visceral (belly) fat. Then instead of organ ﬁx, you get organ failure. Look at the harm at www. vimeo.com/76110577. Then look for the help at www.thefinalphix.com.

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS PROFESSIONALS

& SERVICES

GOSSIP WOLF

WEDNESDAY,

When You See My Mother, Ask Her To Dance

GREG ALLEN OPENED Evanston’s newest record shop in September—just barely. In a ﬂ ush of optimism, he’d put a sign in the window at 624 Grove Street declaring that Animal Records would open then, but he ran out of time. “It was September 30,” he says. “I’m looking at my watch, and it’s 4:30 in the a ernoon. I’m like, ‘Dang, man, we’re not gonna get opened in September.’” A friend of the shop’s only other employee didn’t think Allen should drag the process out, though—a er all, they had a remodeled storefront and some records already on display. So Allen put aside his misgivings and threw open the doors to Animal Records for the ﬁrst time late on a Monday.

“We’re running a couple weeks behind, but we got opened, which is the important thing,” Allen says. “All the customers who come in, I say, ‘Hey, listen, please be patient with us, ’cause it’s a work in progress.’ We don’t have anything alphabetized yet, but everything that’s on the ﬂoor is priced.”

It might take Allen a minute to get every last detail in order, but he’s been preparing for this for a long time. He bought record bins from Evanston shop 2nd Hand Tunes a er it closed in 2013, and he bought record dividers from Dave’s Records in Lincoln Park a er owner Dave Crain closed that store at the end of 2022. “We haven’t put any of the divider cards out yet, though,” Allen admits.

And Allen’s got records, of course. He’s collected for decades. “I’ve always kind of known

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

that I wanted to own a record shop,” he says. “I’ve always just been buying big amounts of records in bulk. Sometimes I’ll buy ’em off collectors, sometimes at garage sales, estate sales.” Allen estimates he’s amassed 40,000 to 50,000 records for the shop, though less than 10 percent are priced for sale.

In the early 1990s, Teenbeat Records put out a couple releases by Allen’s wacky rock band, Sexual Milkshake—their EP Space Gnome and Other Hits appears on the cover of Henry Rollins’s latest recordobsession book, Stay Fanatic!!! Vol. 4 . He’s since gotten married and helped raise a family, but his two children are in college now. “Now that we’ve got both of our kids out of the house,” he says, “my wife gave me the thumbs-up and said, ‘If you wanna do your record store now, this is the chance.’”

Allen had been looking for a storefront for about a year before he found the Grove Street location, which also got the approval of Allen’s wife and his friend Tim Peterson , who owns Squeezebox Books & Music. Allen signed a lease in June and started working full-time on the shop in July. He named it Animal Records a er three things he loves: pets, the Monkees, and the crazed Muppet drummer in Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem.

So far Animal Records stocks exclusively secondhand inventory in several formats, mostly LPs. Allen aims to open the basement to diggers in 2025. “I just wanna make a place that has a lot of aﬀordable records for people who are just kind of casual record buyers,” he says. “You know, maybe young people who just bought their ﬁrst turntable.”

Animal Records hosts a three-day grand opening starting Friday, October 18. For details, check the shop’s Instagram page (animal recordsevanston). Its usual hours are noon till 6 PM, Tuesday through Saturday ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 , Chicag o postpunk band Stalled self-release their debut album, Dust Inside a Dream . Front man and guitarist Jack Curtin started the band early in the pandemic, and for the ﬁrst

year and a half they were a duo. But Curtin thought another player would add complexity and density to their lush, dreamy sound.

“I was wanting to open it up into a threepiece and have a bass in there, ’cause playing with just guitar and drums can only get you so far,” Curtin says. “I don’t think I use enough fuzz to carry the sounds with just a guitar.”

In early 2022, Curtin met Dylan Flynn at the moving company where they both worked, and Flynn joined Stalled on bass that spring. Nate Whitcome replaced the band’s original drummer shortly a er.

“The main shift between the stuff that we were doing before Nate and Dylan came on board and a er, it’s just a lot more collaborative,” Curtin says. “We’re able to just ﬁll up the songs as a three-piece rather than building up primarily from a guitar.”

The band started writing Dust Inside a Dream in winter 2022, and Whitcome began recording it in summer 2023. Stalled have been performing these songs live for a while, but releasing them formally (as a download and as a cassette) still feels like an occasion. “It’s pretty much a piece in time of everything we’ve been doing with the band,” Curtin says. “There’s a little piece of everyone who’s supported us and helped us along the way.”

THIS WEEKEND in Fort Wayne, Indiana, midwestern collective Great Lakes Dungeon Synth throws a three-day festival of dungeon synth—a genre that, broadly speaking, consists of eerie synth music inﬂuenced by black metal. If you can’t make the three-hour drive to Fort Wayne to see it, though, you’re not completely out of luck: Avondale metal shop Meteor Gem hosts a Great Lakes Dungeon Siege preparty on Thursday, October 17, at 7 PM. “You get to meet some of your favorite dungeon-synth artists ( Coniferous Myst , Nest , and Cernunnos Woods , among others, will be in attendance) and actually socialize with them over pizza and beer, completely outside the chaos of the festival environment,” says collective member Jon Rosenthal (aka Nightshade).

Two Dungeon Siege artists will perform at Cole’s the following Tuesday, October 22: Virginia project Vaelastrasz and Lila Starless of DragonKeep , here playing epic black metal with Ardente . They’ll open for the Damián Antón Ojeda project Sadness in what could be one of its last shows. “It is my understanding that Damián is retiring from music,” Rosenthal says, “but I have no idea what time will bring!” —LEOR GALIL

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

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Ace space

Should nightclubs cater to those who are repulsed by sex?

By DAN SAVAGE

Q: I am a 28-year-old, cisgender, sex-repulsed, and asexual gay man. While some asexuals choose to have sex for the pleasure it provides their partner, sex-repulsed asexuals like me do not engage in sexual activity and do not wish to be exposed to it. As a sexrepulsed asexual gay man, I feel alienated when I enter gay spaces like bars, parties, clubs. Gay allosexuals* don’t seem to be aware that hypersexualized spaces make asexual men like me feel unsafe and unwanted. We are forced to choose between being isolated or entering spaces where other men are kissing, grinding, or worse. Also, bartenders are o en shirtless, there are go-go dancers, and even the posters on the walls feature sexually explicit imagery. When gay sex is foregrounded like this, it makes gay men like me feel like we are not welcome in the gay community. And to answer the obvious question: I go to gay bars for many of the same reasons allosexual gay men go to gay bars: to socialize, feel safe, and to meet potential romantic (not sexual) partners. I also go because gay hookup apps are terrible for everyone, but they’re especially terrible for asexual gay men. I feel like there should be one night a week where gay bars are safe spaces for asexual gay men. It doesn’t feel like asking people to remain clothed and refrain from groping each other one night a week is too much to ask if it makes a marginalized group within our own com-

munity feel welcome. I am curious what you think of my proposal and whether this is an idea that you would get behind. —GAY ACE GAY SPACE * Editor’s note: Allosexual refers to people who do not identify as asexual—that is, people who regularly experience sexual attraction, regardless of their sexual orientation.

a: “I’m a 28-year-old gay man, just like GAGS, but I’m not asexual,” said Jonathan, a regular commenter at the Savage Love website who I’ve tapped to speak for all allosexual gay men everywhere. “I’m an enthusiastic gay bar, club, and partygoer. I went to Town in D.C. for the shirtless twinks and twunks and go to the Eagle in NYC for the hot leather guys in jockstraps. We go out because of the dancing, kissing, groping, grinding, hot bartenders, and go-go boys. We like it this way! If we wanted weak drinks in a nonsexual environment, we’d go to Applebee’s.”

Jonathan argues (and I, another allosexual gay man, happen to agree with him) that gay men clumped up in urban areas to create spaces where we could be ourselves. When the first gayborhoods began to appear (or, more accurately, began to enter public consciousness), those spaces were pretty much limited to bars (sexually charged) and bathhouses (extremely sexually charged). But as more gay men and other queer people came out and moved in, lots of other kinds of spaces in gayborhoods—less sexual-

ly charged spaces—became places where we could be ourselves (cafes, restaurants, bookstores, gyms, sidewalks, city halls, etc.).

“GAGS should try gay sports leagues, gyms, meetup groups, book clubs, youth mentorship programs, supper clubs—all of those have the nonsexual vibe he wants,” Jonathan said. “And if there isn’t a scene he likes where he lives, he should create one. My city didn’t used to have a fisting club or an ABDL night, but now, thanks to friends, it does. GAGS should focus on cultivating the environments he desires instead of asking other gay men to censor ourselves. We aren’t interested in being demure. It also wouldn’t be profitable for the venues.”

Kevin Kauer, who co-owns and curates Massive, a bar in Seattle created for the whole LGBTQ+ community, agreed with Jonathan on the venues point.

“I strive to create a space that’s safe and welcoming for all,” Kauer said, “but GAGS’s proposal sounds like an unprofitable flip of the fun switch to off. While certainly fun for some, what he describes is just not the essence of a large queer nightclub. Maybe GAGS could try a house party?”

You may have a hard time filling a house party. While there are roughly 40 million men in the U.S. between the ages of 21 and 40 (age-appropriate potential romantic partners for a 28-year-old gay man), only 2 percent of those men are gay (800,000), only 1 percent of gay men are asexual (8,000), and only a small percentage of asexuals are

sex-repulsed (as opposed to sex-positive, sex-neutral, and sex-negative). While you’re not limited to dating or partnering with other asexuals—because of course you aren’t—you’re asking bars owners to set one night per week aside for asexual guys and their admirers, and, I’m sorry, but there aren’t enough asexual guys for a night like that to pencil out.

OK, since I don’t want to be accused of stacking the deck against you (or ganging

up on you) by only quoting allosexuals, GAGS, I reached out to Cody Daigle-Orians, the author, educator, and asexuality advocate behind Ace Dad Advice, a social media-based asexuality education project. R ead the rest of the column at the URL savage.love.

Follow Daigle-Orians at Instagram @acedadadvice. Learn more about his work and order his books I Am Ace and The Aceand Aro Rela-

tionship Guide at his website, acedadadvice.com. Find Kauer at Instagram handle @kk_nark. Follow Massive on Instagram @massive_club. Full disclosure: my husband Terry Miller (Instagram handle is @disappearing_tm) hosts a monthly fetish night at Massive. v

Ask your burning questions, download podcasts, read full column archives, and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love