Print Issue of October 26, 2017 (Volume 47, Number 4) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | O C T O B E R 2 6 , 2 0 1 7

Rich Jones gives a verse to the

CHICAGO MOTHMAN The cryptid of the summer speaks for itself on the rapper’s Halloween-season single. By ED BLAIR 26

MORE TRICKS AND TREATS Mayor Rahm’s eerily familiar budget speech 9 Behind the gory scenes of Splatter Theater 14 A Memory Palace of Fear explores our real haunted houses. 20 Horror classics return for Halloween. 23 The Satanic majesty of Coven’s occult psych rock 34

LECTURES & TALKS

Photo by Dennis O’Neil

LIVING TALL

Photo courtesy of WXY

DESIGN DIALOGUES

*Color(ed) Theory by Amanda Williams

What Will Make Tall Buildings More Habitable?

Living with Infrastructure

The City Through the Lens of Segregation

Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 6pm $20 public / $12 members

Thursday, November 9 at 6pm The number of Chicagoans living near industrial $25 public / $17 CAF members

To facilitate livable cities, tall buildings must be constructed with greater understanding and consideration of their connection to the people living in and around them. Hear four experts speak on this topic. Join CAF and program partner The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) for this lively discussion and rapid-fire presentations from the four panelists.

SERIES PARTNER

Tuesday, November 7, at 6pm $15 public / $7 members

uses may increase soon, with proposals to rezone the Chicago River’s north branch and phase out some planned manufacturing districts. Can design mitigate this new live-work proximity for mutual benefit? Claire Weisz, founding principal of WXY Architecture + Urban Design, will share the story of her work on a beautifully designed municipal salt storage facility in New York City. David Reynolds, Commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Fleet and Facility Management, will discuss the possibilities for innovative and sensitive design involving the upcoming move of the city’s main fleet garage from Goose Island to Englewood.

READING ARCHITECTURE

Join us as we take a close look at segregation in the built environment with WBEZ’s Natalie Moore and artist and architect Amanda Williams. We’ll examine how our choices and attitudes greatly shape the city around us. Both lifelong natives of the South Side, Natalie and Amanda regularly explore themes of home, place and race in their work. The two friends and collaborators will share ideas from Natalie’s new book, “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation,” and Amanda’s Color(ed) Theory*, a place-based commentary that was featured in the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

ALL LECTURES TAKE PLACE AT 224 S. MICHIGAN AVE. TICKETS AT ARCHITECTURE.ORG/PROGRAMS 2 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

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

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE LIT

Matt Taibbi: Eric Garner’s case proves broken windows policing is broken In his new book I Can’t Breathe, the Rolling Stone writer examines how complex forces slowly strangled the Staten Island man. BY RYAN SMITH 12

COMEDY

Bloody good show An unﬂinching look behind the gory scenes of Splatter Theater, the Annoyance’s savagely funny 30-year-old slasher spoof BY STEVE HEISLER 14

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com

4 Agenda The Neo-Futurists’ Tangles & Plagues, stand-up Hari Kondabolu, Helltrap Nightmare, the ﬁlm Woodpeckers, a “hex-along” Hocus Pocus, and more goings-on about town

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 30 Shows of note Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples, Coven, Young Thug, and more of the week’s best

CITY LIFE

8 Chicagoans A former Playboy editor recalls Hugh Hefner’s thankyou notes. 9 Joravsky | Politics In his 2018 budget speech, the mayor does what he does best: praises himself. 11 Transportation Mayor Emanuel’s ride-share fee hike is a sensible proposal to help the CTA compete with Lyft and Uber.

CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY STM READER, LLC, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654. COPYRIGHT © 2017 CHICAGO READER. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®.

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF DREW. FOR MORE OF HIS WORK, GO TO JEFFDREWPICTURES.COM.

The cryptid of the summer speaks for itself on the rapper’s Halloween-season single. BY ED BLAIR 26

FOOD & DRINK

39 Restaurant review: Land & Lake Kitchen Mom and pop would scoﬀ at the regional cliches of LM Restaurant Group’s new spot at the LondonHouse Hotel. 41 Key Ingredient: Aji amarillo Joshua Marrelli, chef at Bakersﬁeld Wood-Fired Grill, tracks down the Peruvian pepper.

CLASSIFIEDS

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Rich Jones gives a verse to the Chicago Mothman

23 Movies Horror classics The Old Dark House and The Unknown return for Halloween. 25 Movies Revolutions of the Night uncovers the childhood trauma that shaped outsider artist Henry Darger.

42 Jobs 42 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace

ARTS & CULTURE

18 Culture Organizers are mobilizing to ensure the Obama Presidential Center serves the community. 19 Theater In Teatro Línea de Sambra’s Amarillo, what doesn’t kill you kills you anyway. 20 Theater Theater Oobleck’s A Memory Palace of Fear explores our real haunted houses. 21 Lit Isabel Allende’s In the Midst of Winter is a sly response to antiimmigrant fear.

44 Straight Dope Does the idea of artificially altering hurricanes’ strength have any scientific validity? 45 Savage Love The most dangerous form of breath play 46 Early Warnings Talib Kweli, Death From Above, Tune-Yards, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf Cole’s hosts a Halloween cover-band benefit for Mexico and Puerto Rico, and other music news.

OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

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Arnie the Doughnut o SUZANNE PLUNKETT

THEATER More at chicagoreader.com/theater Arnie the Doughnut Can a R rainbow-sprinkled doughnut and a rules-loving man ﬁnd happiness together

without one eating the other or without both running afoul of the overzealous condo board president? These are the central questions of Frances Limoncelli’s adaptation of Laurie Keller’s children’s book, and while some of the solutions defy basic logic, who really cares? Doughnuts make everything better! Lifeline’s current production is a delight, from George Howe’s songs to Rachel Sypniewski’s doughnut costumes, and especially Juanita Andersen’s performance as the evil condo board president and the French Cruller. —AIMEE LEVITT Through 11/26: Sat-Sun 11 AM and 1 PM, Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $15. The Black Renaissance This R pageantlike “musical resistance against racism,” written and directed by

Jackie Taylor for her Black Ensemble Theater, features original songs as well as spoken testimony describing the long, wearying history of institutionalized racism in America, from colonial days to the present. The narrative describes a repeated pattern of progress and backlash—for example, post-Civil War Reconstruction followed by a wave of Ku Klux Klan lynchings, or the two-term presidency of Barack Obama followed by the election of Donald Trump. A major theme of Taylor’s script is the dehumanizing impact—on people of every race—of systemic racism in America over the centuries, the poison that has turned the American “melting pot” into a witches’ brew of conflict and chaos. The show is packed with rousing musical numbers in gospel, R&B, rap, and reggae idioms, powerfully sung by a first-rate cast backed by a dynamic offstage band under drummer Robert Reddrick’s direction. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 11/19: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM (8 PM only 11/11), Sun 3 PM, Black Ensemble Theater Cultural Center, 4450 N. Clark, 773-769-4451, blackensembletheater.org, $49.50-$65.

Carrie 2: The Rage You can learn stuff from this “unauthorized musical parody.” Like, did you know that there was a Broadway musical based on Carrie, the 1976 horror movie about a teenage girl with a bad case of telekinetic anger? Yes. It ran for five performances in 1988. And did you further know that somebody made a movie sequel to Carrie called The Rage: Carrie 2, about another teen girl named Rachel who— what were the chances?—lives in the same town and has the same problem? Writer/composer Preston Max Allen takes the sequel as his starting point, going to some trouble to build a conceit that will bring us up to speed on its insipidity. The effort doesn’t really work, but no matter: once things get going, his songs and a solid cast make for rude fun. Choreographer Maggie Robinson supplies a surprisingly lovely flashback. And, under codirectors Rachel Elise Johnson and Isaac Loomer, the final number neatly satirizes Spring Awakening. —TONY ADLER Through 11/19: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 4 PM, Mon 7:30 PM; also Tue 10/31, 7:30 PM, the Arkham, 4609 N. Clark, $20-$25. Don’t Look Back/Must Look Back Last year, Albany Park Theater Project used the shuttered Ellen Gates Starr High School building to incredible effect for the site-specific drama Learning Curve. For this 75-minute promenade experience by Tanya Palmer about immigration, the grown-ups at Pivot Arts operate out of a similar playbook in and around the Chinese Mutual Aid Association office in Uptown. But the long, artsy movement and dance interludes don’t educate as well here—cursory overviews of realities like ESL classes and resettlement financing give way to abstruse and scattershot fragments. An indicative moment: audiences are asked to sit on the floor in a room and reflect on context-free statistics projected on the wall, then handed a snack of rambutan. Rather than tapping into Uptown’s rich history, Devon de Mayo’s production mostly exploits it as set dressing. —DAN JAKES Through 11/19: Fri-Sun 7:30 PM, Chinese Mutual Aid Association, 1016 W. Argyle, pivotarts. org, $53, $20 students.

him (in 1982, a year before his death) he drank his lunch, wouldn’t stop ranting about another critic who’d done him dirt, and unilaterally declared our conversation over, storming off in his enormous fur coat. His Greatness is set around the time of that fiasco. Playwright Daniel MacIvor focuses on Williams’s brief sojourn in Vancouver, where his drugand-liquor-stoked exploits apparently became part of local lore. In this fictionalized account, an artist very (very!) like Williams hits highs and lows while his long-suffering assistant and an ambitious young hustler vie for his affections. The scenario is as familiar as it is pathetic, but MacIvor and director David Zak invest it with an elegiac quality right out of The Glass Menagerie, without sacrificing the situation’s delicious vulgarity. Danne W. Taylor is perfect—addled and sly, sad and sybaritic—as the pseudo Williams. —TONY ADLER Through 11/12: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM (except Sat 10/28, 5 PM), Sun 7 PM, the Buena at Pride Arts Center, 4147 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, pridefilmsandplays.com, $10-$25.

The Last Days of the Commune Prop Thtr presents a multimedia take on Bertolt Brecht’s last, unfinished play. In the waning days of the Paris workers’ uprising of 1871, everyday people struggle unsuccessfully to form a new kind of society before being mowed down by the novel technology of the rapid-fire mitrailleuse. Similarly, the play throws songs, video, and various forms of speechifying at the audience, trying in vain to tell this story of grand failure. The music—composed and directed by Kyle Ann Greer, playing keyboards near stage left—rarely blends with the dialogue and the amplified instruments often drown out the unamplified singing, while the video segments are unnecessary and often inaudible. The busy shuttling of 23-member cast on- and

oﬀstage contributes to a cacophonous and inchoate production that leaves the audience bludgeoned and bloodied on the barricades much like those poor Communards. Stefan Brün directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 11/19: FriSat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-539-7838, propthtr.org, $20. Lysistrata Jones Refuge Theatre R Project’s fun follow-up to its acclaimed production of High Fidelity:

The Musical takes the well-told story of Lysistrata back to school in a musical comedy with book by Douglas Carter Beane and score by Lewis Flinn. Set at Athens University, the story follows the school’s perennially losing basketball team and cheerleader Lysistrata Jones’s (Mary-Margaret Roberts) master plan to have the athletes’ girlfriends stop “giving it up” until they get a win. Under Justin Brill’s direction, the sexual premise surprisingly pivots into a story about finding love in unexpected places and being yourself, with lush, catchy harmonies and high-energy dance numbers choreographed by Shanna VanDerwerker. The book has glimpses of sharp humor, but could use work on some of its easy stereotypes and metaexplanations of its ancient source material. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 11/19: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 6 PM, Unity Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1212 W. Balmoral, 773-878-4747, refugetheatre. com, $25. Mr. Lee’s Night of Horror Like most horror movies, Mr. Lee is a show about sounds—and the absence thereof. Building suspense are the pauses after the sound of a creaky floorboard, an unidentifiable scream, or, in this case, a sudden rendition of Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie,” performed by two actors rushing the stage as a third actor eats a sandwich. In fact, Mr. Lee leans too heavily on silence—the line “What was that?” might as well be the subtitle. Whether characters are sitting in a car

The Black Renaissance o MICHAEL COURIER

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of October 26

include choreographer Ray Mercer’s Tossed Around, a lively all-troupe show set to South African music composed by Sbongiseni “Bongi” Duma. Fri 10/27-Sat 10/28, 7:30 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $15-$75.

For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

COMEDY Bloodlust Reilly Wilson and Shelby Quinn present a campy Halloween-themed sketch revue with scenes featuring vampires, Halloween candy, and copious amounts of blood. Through 10/28: Thu-Sat 10 PM, iO Theater, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/chicago, $10, $8 for students.

Sarah Sherman, seen here in a sketch called “Nipple Pizza,” hosts Helltrap Nightmare Fri 10/27 at the Hideout. waiting to validate an urban legend about a goat-faced woman or making themselves at home in a dilapidated old house, they react to creepy noises by saying, and doing, nothing. Well, they do occasionally talk, but it’s slight variations on the tagline: “What the fuck was that shit? Jesus fucking Christ!” Despite its roots in bloodcurdling horror, the show makes barely a peep. —STEVE HEISLER Through 10/27: Fri 7:30 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800-650-6449, pubhousetheatre.com, $15. A Swell in the Ground When your romantic partner doesn’t listen, or says insensitive things, or pays an old flame a visit, or cheats on you, or breaks up with you, you feel shitty, especially if your career sucks and/or your parents die. Also, being a grown-up is hard. That’s about all there is to Janine Nabers’s world-premiere navel-gazer, in which four college friends pair up, split up, recombine, and feel shitty across 17 years. Like many young contemporary playwrights, Nabers seems convinced her job begins and ends with letting characters stew, fret, seethe, and occasionally wax quirkily poetic, as though the expression of reasonably injured feelings is compelling drama. The talents of director Chika Ike’s admirably thoughtful cast make the 105 minutes of this Gift Theatre production more compelling than they ought to be. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 12/10: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Gift Theatre Company, 4802 N. Milwaukee, 773-283-7071, thegifttheatre. org, $35-$40, $30 seniors, $20 students. Tangles & Plagues This remarkR able play by Neo-Futurist Kirsten Riiber asks how it feels to remember nothing. To lose, first, the reality at hand—where your comb is, what day it is, who let you into the room. Then the big stuff. Hitchhiking in the south of France that summer with a girl in a yellow jumpsuit. Weddings, birthdays. The nostalgias: famous movie lines, “three

easy payments of $19.95,” first kisses. Finally, like the flicker of a dying match in a dark theater, everything goes. What happens to the memories? What will happen to us without them? Inspired in part by Riiber’s work as an assistant in a retirement community, the piece challenges its audiences to experience the decline into oblivion as sufferers of dementia themselves experience it. The result is a funny, scary, and ultimately transformative journey. Jen Ellison directs. —MAX MALLER Through 11/18: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, 773-275-5255, neofuturists. org, $25, $10 students, Thursday nights pay what you can.

Hari Kondabolu Giselle If a traditional staging of a classic ballet is going to be successful, it needs to be impeccably performed. Joffrey’s production of Lola De Ávila’s 2012 adaptation of Giselle features moments of spellbinding finesse and raw athletic power, but lukewarm characterizations and occasional wobbles interrupt the magic. Giselle (Christine Rocas) and Albrecht (Dylan Gutierrez) lack the chemistry needed to sell her death by heartbreak at the end of the first act. Their characters are deepened by sadness in the second, but that shift would be stronger if the earlier affection was fully realized. In dramatic

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Death Toll The one rule at this spooky sketch show is that the audience has to drink whenever somebody onstage dies. Ghouls, ghosts, and Shakespearean spirits of the night abound, so the cold claw of death is inevitable. Drink up! Sat 10/28 and Tue 10/31, 11 PM, Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, 773-650-1331, cornservatory.org, $10 online, $15 at the door. Helltrap Nightmare Sarah R Sherman, one of the most lauded stand-ups in the city, hosts this show

featuring alt-comics, noise musicians, and a ton of surprises. No material is concrete, so Sherman and coproducer Julia Dratel are likely just as excited as the audience to see what shakes out. Tonight features the Shrimp Boys, musician Grun Wasser, and more. Fri 10/27, 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-2274433, hideoutchicago.com. Hari Kondabolu As a ﬁrst-genR eration American whose family emigrated from India, Kondabolu under-

With Blood, With Ink SevenR teenth-century poet and scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seminal

ﬁgure in Mexican literature, among other things, had the misfortune to live in a time when women were to be silent and submissive. This chamber opera about her life and death—written in 1993 by Daniel Crozier (music) and Peter M. Krask’s (libretto) when they were doctoral candidates at Johns Hopkins’s Peabody Conservatory and revived here by the Third Eye Theatre Ensemble— communicates well the tension between her cramped, constricted life and her expansive, creative soul, a tension heightened by the contrast between the simple, spartan staging in Prop Thtr’s smallish performing space and the soaring notes director Rose Freeman’s full-throated ensemble lets ﬂy. —JACK HELBIG Through 11/5: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-5397838, propthtr.org, $25, $20 students.

DANCE Giordano Dance Chicago’s Fall R Engagement This sampling of Giordano Dance’s work digs from the

archives of the company’s 55 years of existence. Featured performances

Zach & Viggo Dream Team contrast, Gayeon Jung and Edson Barbosa’s effervescent, elation-filled peasant pas de deux makes you want to follow their characters through the rest of the work. —OLIVER SAVA Through 10/29: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, joffrey.org, $39-$174.

stands what it’s like to be an outsider. He pokes holes in our stereotypes of other cultures, and shares stories about his overbearing parents. Sun 10/29, 7 and 9:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $20. Megan Hosack’s Musical Comedy Variety Hour Directed by Second City alum Peter Kim, Hosack’s one-person show W

OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA animation onward, this delightful, digressive, breezy collaboration, staged to look more spontaneous than it possibly could be, celebrates and enhances both artists, repeatedly finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and growing more reflective and melancholy only in its Swiss epilogue. For Varda, this is a spinoff of sorts to The Gleaners and I (2000) and The Beaches of Agnès (2008); for me it was a welcome introduction to the work of JR. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 89 min. Fri 10/27, 3:45, 5:45, and 7:45 PM; Sat 10/28-Sun 10/29, 1:45, 3:45, 5:45, and 7:45 PM; Mon 10/30-Tue 10/31, 3:45, 5:45, and 7:45 PM; Wed 11/1, 5:45 and 7:45 PM; and Thu 11/2, 3:45, 5:45, and 7:45 PM. Music Box.

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B includes autobiographical songs about her aﬃnity for her cats as well as for Family Feud. Through 11/11: Sat 10 PM, Second City de Maat Theatre, 230 W. North, third ﬂoor, 312-337-3992, secondcity.com, $13. The New Enlightenment Variety Show Though this showcase is long, its hybrid of top local standups and musical guests keep things running smoothly. Trivia segments pop up between acts. Through 2/28/2018: Thu 9 PM-midnight, Lilly’s, 2513 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2422. The Storefront Gets Sketchy: Honey, XIVe Run Out of Show Titles Comedy collective the Storefront held an open call for sketches, soliciting submissions from veterans and rookies. Now a rotating cast of performers brings those sketches to light. Thu 10/26-Fri 10/27, 8 PM, Collaboraction, 1579 N. Milwaukee, 312-226-9633, $10.

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Zach & Viggo Dream Team Zach Zucker and Viggo Venn—American and Norwegian, respectively—combine sketch with dance, clowning, and physical comedy. Audience participation is highly encouraged. 10/27-10/29: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 8 PM, Judy’s Beat Lounge, Second City Training Center, 230 W. North, second ﬂoor, 312-337-3992, $15-$20.

LIT & LECTURES Live Wire Radio Luke BurR bank’s touring podcast Live Wire captures the energy of live theater by taping just that, in the form of actors, storytellers, comedians, and Salman Rushdie. The guests on Chicago’s bill are poet Kevin Coval and Cards Against

Humanity’s Max Temkin. Sat 10/28, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, lh-st.com, $20-$140. Aram Han Sifuentes’s R Protest Banner Lending Library Workshop Handcrafted

signs, sewn by Sifuentes and volunteers, are on display and available for borrowing. Slogans available include DUMP TRUMP and CHAPTER ONE: LOVE YOURSELF. Thu 10/26, 2 PM, Alphawood Gallery, 2401 N. Halsted, alphawoodgallery.org.

VISUAL ART Inception Fashion designer Agnieszka Kulon and video artist Edward Yang collaborated on this immersive exhibit featuring fashion, animation, projections, and music. It’s a prologue to The TimeGate, a virtual reality project the Zhou brothers started in China this year. Through 11/3. Mon-Fri 10 AM-5 PM, Sat noon-7 PM. Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th, 773-523-0200, zbcenter.org.

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/ movies NEW REVIEWS Faces Places In this French R road movie, whose original title juxtaposes faces with villages,

89-year-old ﬁlmmaker Agnès Varda follows 33-year-old photographer and installation muralist JR across the countryside as he and his team photograph working people, enlarge these shots into monumental black-and-white likenesses, and paste them onto the sides of the buildings where the subjects live and work. From the opening-credit

Geostorm For the first time since The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Hollywood finds the nerve to acknowledge climate change, though only in the most cowardly terms, hawking the pernicious fantasy of a global satellite system that can neutralize extreme weather events on earth. The problem isn’t your carbon-spewing SUV—it’s a villain inside the Democratic presidential administration who’s reprogrammed the system to obliterate enemies of the U.S. (Frenemies, anyway—Dubai and Hong Kong fall victim to calamitous storms, but not Tehran or Pyongyang.) Gerard Butler plays the swaggering bad-boy astronaut called out of retirement to blast off to the International Space Station and straighten things out. The script, every scene of which you’ve seen 100 times already, ends with a sermon urging us to unite and salvage the future, though this rings hollow coming at the end of a $120 million exercise in sci-fi denial. Dean Devlin directed; with Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Ed Harris, and Andy Garcia. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 109 min. ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Showplace ICON. The Killing of a Sacred Deer After such menacing dadaist comedies as Dogtooth (2009) and The Lobster (2015), Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos settles down with a conventional suspense story about a buttoned-down cardiovascular surgeon (Colin Farrell in a thick beard) being harassed by a fatherless teenager with an ax to grind (Barry Keoghan). The filmmaker’s trademark weirdness creeps into the movie at times—particularly in the doctor’s bedroom, where his wife (Nicole Kidman) can arouse him only through the ritual of stripping down to her underwear and assuming an attitude of ravishment across the bed. But Lanthimos’s habitual tweaking of bourgeois values is diluted here by the familiar mechanics of the stalker plot, given a somber, arty staging and periodically goosed by the discordant strings of Hungarian avant-garde composer György Ligeti. With Bill

AGENDA Camp and Alicia Silverstone. —J.R. JONES R, 121 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21. The Snowman An international cast and crew contributed to this mystery thriller, two hours of uninterrupted, snow-caked boredom in which a Norwegian detective (Michael Fassbender) tracks a serial killer who likes to chop up his female victims with a motor-driven, wire-looped amputation tool. Director Tomas Alfredson, best known for the Swedish vampire classic Let the Right One In (2008), works in drab, desaturated colors that heighten the sense of chill in his cheap, blocky, institutional settings. The actors come from all over the place (Fassbender from Germany, Charlotte Gainsbourg from France, Rebecca Ferguson from Sweden, Toby Jones from the UK, J.K. Simmons from the U.S.) but play Norwegian characters speaking British-accented English, which is more perplexing than the string of murders. Martin Scorsese was attached as director at one point, and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker helped pull this thing together. —J.R. JONES R, 119 min. ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Showplace ICON. Wonderstruck Moviegoers may know Brian Selznick’s ﬁction through Hugo (2011), Martin Scorsese’s antsy adaptation of the Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret; this screen version of Selznick’s subsequent book was directed by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Carol), who takes a more sedate and digniﬁed approach. The parallel, interwoven stories involve a Minnesota boy running away to New York City in 1977 to track down his absentee father (which Selznick presented entirely as text) and a deaf girl in Hoboken heading for the same destination 50 years earlier to make contact with her mother (which he depicted entirely in illustrations). To approximate the book’s narrative dichotomy, Haynes pres-

ents the girl’s story as an old silent ﬁlm, tipping his hat to the early cinema just as Hugo did with its plot involving French pioneer Georges Méliès. The intersection point of the children’s respective time lines is predictable and slow to arrive, but the movie is handsomely mounted like all of Haynes’s work. With Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, and James Urbaniak. —J.R. JONES PG, 117 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Woodpeckers The title of R this tragic romance from the Dominican Republic refers

to male prisoners who hang on the window bars of an elevated common area that overlooks the exercise yard for an adjoining women’s prison; starved for love, the two sexes use sign language to communicate with each other, nurturing passionate affairs with people they’ve never touched. Into this emotional hothouse comes a tall, handsome Haitian (Jean Jean), who agrees to serve as woodpecker for his prison protector (Ramón Emilio Candelario) while the other man is in solitary confinement but who then blunders, Cyrano-style, into an illicit flirtation with the man’s spitfire girlfriend in the yard below (Judith Rodriguez Perez). “If enough time is spent doing this, you will sense my touch and my embrace,” she tells him, which is dangerous news in a community governed by violence and revenge. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 107 min. Fri 10/27, 8 PM; Sat 10/28, 5 PM; Sun 10/29, 4:45 PM; Mon 10/30, 7:45 PM; Tue 10/31, 7:30 PM; Wed 11/1, 8 PM; and Thu 11/2, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center. REVIVALS Night of the Living Dead R George Romero’s gory, style-setting 1968 horror film, made for pennies in Pittsburgh. Its premise—the unburied dead arise and eat the living—is a powerful combination of the

fantastic and the dumbly literal. Over its short, furious course, the picture violates so many strong taboos—cannibalism, incest, necrophilia—that it leaves audiences giddy and hysterical. Romero’s sequel, Dawn of the Dead, displays a much-matured technique and greater thematic complexity, but Night retains its raw power. —DAVE KEHR 96 min. Screening in a new 4K restoration at Music Box: Fri 10/27-Sat 10/28, 4:45 and 9:15 PM; Sun 10/29, 7 and 9:15 PM; Mon 10/30, 9:45 PM; Tue 10/31, 2:30 and 7 PM; and Wed 11/1-Thu 11/2, 9:45 PM. Also screens at New 400; for showtimes visit chicagoreader. com/movies. The Seventh Victim Though R not directed by an auteurist-approved ﬁgure (Mark Robson

has never attracted any cult to my knowledge), this is the greatest of producer Val Lewton’s justly celebrated low-budget chillers—a beautifully wrought story about the discovery of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village that fully lives up to the morbid John Donne quote framing the action. Intricately plotted over its 71 minutes by screenwriters Charles O’Neal, De Witt Bodeen, and an uncredited Lewton so that what begins rationally winds up as something far weirder than a thriller plot, this 1943 tale of a young woman (Kim Hunter in her ﬁrst screen role) searching for her troubled sister (Jean Brooks) exudes a distilled poetry of doom that extends to all the characters as well as to the noirish bohemian atmosphere. (As a fascinating intertextual detail, the horny psychiatrist clawed to death by an oﬀscreen feline in Lewton’s previous Cat People—played by Tom Conway, George Sanders’s brother— is resurrected here.) —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 71 min. 35mm. Tue 10/31, 7:30 PM. Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium.

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SPECIAL EVENTS Cinepocalypse An eight-day festival of new genre ﬁlms, related documentaries, and retrospective screenings. For a full schedule visit musicboxtheatre.com. Thu 11/2-Thu 11/9. Music Box. Hocus Pocus Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker play 17th-century witches who appear in contemporary Salem, Massachusetts, in a comic fantasy directed by Kenny Ortega. PG, 95 min. Captioned for audience participation. 35mm. Mon 10/30, 7 PM. Music Box.

Woodpeckers

RATS!

Lost Landscapes of Los Angeles Archivist Rick Prelinger presents an “urban history ﬁlm event,” collecting documentary, home-movie, and other footage of Los Angeles. Thu 11/2, 7 PM. Logan Center for the Arts. F v

OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE Chicagoans

The former Playboy editor

ò ISA GIALLORENZO

Barbara Nellis, 72

Street View

Simply elegant

“MY STYLING PROCESS was like, ‘Oh no, it’s almost time to leave!’” cracks Dana Bassett, spotted at the Hyde Park Art Center gala in a frock by French designer Manoush. “Part of the reason I love this dress so much is because it’s so vibrant on its own, it doesn’t really need much added to it,” says Bassett, the development director for the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions Project (ACRE) and a producer of the long-running art podcast Bad at Sports as well as Bad at Sports Center, a Wednesday morning show on Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM). She topped off her look with a few statement accessories, including a clutch inherited from her grandmother, one of Bassett’s strongest style inspirations. “She was the quintessential New-York-to-Miami transplant golden girl, and she deﬁnitely dressed the part. Lots of gold, sequins, glitter, and patterns.” And the feather headpiece? It was gifted to her as she entered the party. “The color matched my dress perfectly,” she says, “so I just threw it in my hair.” —ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on Giallorenzo’s blog chicagolooks.blogspot.com.

HERE’S THE THING all you young folks need to understand: It was the late 60s, the early 70s, and nobody had the credentials to do anything. People were just looking for jobs. I moved to Chicago when I was 25 because my boyfriend was here, and I took a job in Playboy’s marketing department even though I didn’t know anything about marketing, and within six months it was clear that the most interesting people were in the editorial department, and they were drinking every afternoon in the Knickerbocker Bar. In all those 33 years that I was there, I did a ton of different things. I was the book review editor, the music editor, the ﬁction editor, the letters-to-the-editor editor. In the last five years I was on staff, I wrote the copy for the two pages that were in the magazine every month called “Are You Lying Down? Hanging With Hef.” It was pictures of things he was doing in his life, with caption copy. In the early years, I encountered him only as wallpaper. Before he moved to California in ’75, on Sunday nights the editors were often invited to watch a movie at the mansion. He got first-run movies, he got good popcorn, some weeks he had a buffet. I’m sure the models were around.

“It wasn’t about the models for me,” Nellis says. “The mystique of the world I was living in was the writers.” ò BRITTANY SOWACKE

I wrote a little Playmate copy—everybody did. My brother married a Playmate; he is no longer married to her, but I have three nephews from that marriage. It wasn’t about the models for me. The mystique of the world I was living in was the writers. I had lunch with Joan Didion. I have a wonderful poem Shel Silverstein did for my five-year-old daughter. William Styron once said to me, “I’ve always thought of you as Miss Chicago.” And he had written Nat Turner. He had written Sophie’s Choice. I mean, come on. Once I went with a photographer to New Orleans, and he was going to shoot Playmates in places where there was hanging moss and all that stuff, and my job was to eat, shop, listen to music, and write a sidebar of what there was to do in New

Orleans. That was tough, let me tell you. What interested me about Playboy was that it was a completely egalitarian environment. There were people there who had MBAs, people who hadn’t finished college, people who started in some lowly place and worked their way up. The cartoon editor, who became a very powerful woman there, was Hefner’s secretary in the beginning. And she discovered Kliban! Here’s the other thing about Hugh Hefner: He was a midwestern kid. One of the things I used to get at my job a lot was books, and we didn’t have room to review everything. I would get a great jazz book or great photography book and I would send it to him, and he always wrote a thank-you note: “Dear Barbara, thank you very much . . . ” —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 26

FRIDAY 27

SATURDAY 28

SUNDAY 29

MONDAY 30

TUESDAY 31

WEDNESDAY 1

ö Kowa i Nite Cosplay Fest This evening celebrates Japanese pop culture with live DJs, video game tournaments, a costume contest with anime prizes, and two drink tickets included in the entry price. 6:30-10 PM, Artifact Events, 4325 N. Ravenswood, jasc-chicago. org, $25 in advance, $30 at the door.

¿ BaderBrawl 2 Freelance Underground, a new Chicago-based wrestling group, hosts ﬁve one-on-one bouts as well as a “six-man scramble.” Cheer on people like Ruﬀ Crossing, the Voodoo King, and Smash Mouth All Stars. 8:30 PM, Baderbräu, 2515 S. Wabash, bit.do/ baderbrawl, $20 suggested donation.

J Smut Alex Seligsohn and Clare Austen-Smith host stand-up comics who openly discuss their sexuality, kinks and all; there’s sketch comedy and music as well. Tonight’s performers include Lincoln Lodge performer Shannon Noll. 11:30 PM, Laugh Factory, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-3273175, laughfactory.com, $17 plus two-item minimum.

Vampires & Vanities: An Improvised Gothic Novel Popular Chicago troupe Improvised Jane Austen throws vampires into the mix, presenting a two-act show in the spirit of Austen and bloodsuckers alike. 7 PM, McKaw Theater, 1439 W. Jarvis, 773-655-7197, mckayarts.net, $10.

Clarissa Bonet: Ur ban Constructs Bonet photographs the city during the day and at night, comparing the urban landscape soaking in the sun with what it looks like with only building lights illuminating the darkness. 11 AM-6 PM. Northeastern Illinois University Fine Arts Center Gallery, 5500 N. Saint Louis, clarissabonet.com. F

E S aturday Night Live: Th e Ex perience Sets from SNL, including the basement from Wayne’s World, are open to tour. Writers like Seth Meyers, via video, explain the show’s weekly process. 10 AM-5 PM, Museum of Broadcast Communications, 360 N. State, snltheexhibition.com, $25, $20 seniors and students, free for children under 12.

( Th e Fest Through Sun 11/12, Third Coast presents a lineup of top podcasts either recording live episodes or adapting their content for the stage. First up is Reveal, in which poet and playwright Al Letson unearths tidbits about die-hard Trump supporters. 7 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, thefestchicago.org, $15-$30.

8 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

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

CITY LIFE

If Emanuel really was ridding Chicago of “fiscal smoke and mirrors” he’d be looking for more progressive forms of taxation that would enable the city to borrow less money. RICH HEIN/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

POLITICS

Happy Rahm Day In his 2018 budget speech, the mayor does what he does best: praises himself. By BEN JORAVSKY

t’s just a coincidence that Happy Death Day hit movie theaters not long before Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled his 2018 budget with a big speech before the City Council. The film is a grisly Groundhog Day in which a college student wakes up over and over again to the same day that culminates in her getting murdered. Her challenge is to decipher the murderer’s identity and kill him before he kills her again. In the equally horrifying Happy Rahm Day, the mayor heads over to the City Council this time each year to give a budget speech in which he basically says: I’m great. My predecessor was lousy. Feel free to thank me anytime! Clearly, every day is Happy Rahm Day as far as the mayor’s concerned. There’s not enough space in one column to chronicle all of Rahm’s whoppers and halftruths from his October 18 budget speech. I’d like to point out a couple of the biggest ones. “This year, Chicago made lasting and historic progress in Springfield,” the mayor said.

“The dawn of a day for Chicago students has just begun.” In this passage Emanuel’s referring to the school aid distribution bill, signed last month by his new best friend, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, which brings roughly $200 million a year to help Chicago pay its teacher pension bills. So that’s good. What the mayor conveniently failed to mention is that Rauner agreed to sign the bill only after strong-arming Democrats into agreeing to a provision that allows rich people to get a tax credit for donating up to $1 million a year to scholarship funds for religious and other private schools. The wealthy sending their money to private schools is great if the desired result is starving the government. Democrats protested that the tax credit would further deplete the public schools. But Rauner said he wouldn’t sign the school funding bill without the tax credit. And so the Dems went along. My bet is that Rauner will only demand that more money be earmarked for tax J

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continued from 9 credits, should he be reelected next year. As state rep. Will Guzzardi put it, “As far as I’m concerned the nose is under the camel’s tent now, and I’m very concerned about the prospect of this money only growing, and more and more over the years of our public dollars being diverted away.” In short, this was beyond compromise—it was budget blackmail, hardly, something we should be celebrating. In his speech, Emanuel also pronounced that “the days of fiscal smoke and mirrors are behind us. The days of selling off assets to balance the budget and pay Chicago’s bills are behind us. The days of raiding the rainy-day fund to keep the city aﬂoat are behind us.” He was referring, in part, to the dreaded 2008 parking meter sale, in which the city received about $1 billion up front by agreeing to turn over as much as $10 billion in parking meter proceeds over the next 75 years to a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley. Ironically, Rahm’s budget speech came just a week after he convinced the City Council to approve, 43-5, something known as the sales tax securitization plan. This program earmarks the sales taxes Chicago collects each year (about $661 million) for a fund that will be used to pay back the loans the city borrows for various obligations. For lenders, the securitization plan is great because it guarantees they’ll get paid back even if the city goes bankrupt—always a possibility around here. Emanuel argues that dedicating sales taxes to Chicago’s creditors will lower interest and save the city money on borrowing costs. “What we are seeking to do today is to take a public asset—sales tax receipts—and turn that over for 40 years to Wall Street, to the banks,” said 35th Ward alderman Carlos RamirezRosa, who voted against the measure. “We are setting ourselves up for a long-term loss for a short-term gain. When we privatized the parking meters, yes, we got a lot of money. And if we move forward with this, we’ll get a $3 billion credit line. But we will lose $660 million per year in sales tax receipts.” Of course, if Emanuel really was ridding Chicago of “fiscal smoke and mirrors” he’d be looking for more progressive forms of taxation that would enable us to borrow less

money and not have to turn over the sales tax receipts to Wall Street in the first place. Obviously, the mayor is not quite ready for progressive taxation. In any event, he just sold off an asset in the name of never selling off assets to balance the budget again. The mayor also spent a good chunk of his speech praising himself for making tremendous progress with the Chicago Public Schools. (Speaking of municipal entities using fiscal smoke and mirrors to pretend its books are balanced!) “Chicago’s education system,” he said, “has gone from a national laggard to a national leader.” Coincidentally, parent activists from the Raise Your Hand Coalition held a press conference at City Hall a few hours before the speech to demand that the mayor’s handpicked schools CEO, Forrest Claypool, be fired for making cuts in special education. Claypool’s been in the news lately for denying he’s making school cuts even as he whacks away. WBEZ recently published a piece by reporter Sarah Karp documenting that CPS had spent about $14 million to pay consultants from the accounting firms of Crowe Horwath, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG to effectively make it harder for kids to get into special education classes. That way CPS gets to spend less money on special education teachers and more money on high-priced consultants. It’s like they’re taking money from the poorest, most vulnerable kids in the system to devise new schemes to take even more money from them. Man, if CPS is a national leader, as Rahm says, I feel bad for kids around the country. Not surprisingly, the mayor made no mention of Karp or her report in his budget address. He also made no mention of his romance with Amazon. He and Rauner have pledged to hand over untold hundreds of millions of public dollars to one of the world’s largest corporations in hopes of convincing Jeff Bezos, its billionaire CEO, to open a second headquarters here. Hmmm . . . money for billionaires while the public schools look for ways to cut special education. Doesn’t look like the dawn of a new day—just life as usual in Rahm’s Chicago. v

v @joravben

Emanuel’s 2018 budget proposal includes an additional 15-cent surcharge to the existing rideshare fee of 52 cents per trip. He promised it would go to the CTA. ò ASHLEE REZIN/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

Uber mensch

Mayor Emanuel’s ride-share fee hike is a sensible proposal to help the CTA stay competitive with Lyft and Uber. By JOHN GREENFIELD

t’s become all too easy to opt out of taking the CTA with the quick, convenient allure of Lyft and Uber just a couple smartphone clicks away. Recent studies have reported that it’s becoming common for those who can afford ride share to substitute it in place of transit, walking, or biking rather than just using it to replace private car trips. The outcome could be a less efficient, safe, environmentally friendly, and just city. That’s why Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to modestly hike the city’s ride-share fees to help fund the CTA is a sensible idea. It could enable the transit agency to avoid fare increases and improve service, which would help level the playing field and stop transit ridership bleeding. While CTA use had been growing in recent years, the latest figures show that bus and rail ridership has slipped a few percentage points in 2017. Last week when Emanuel released his 2018 budget proposal, he announced that Chicago is planning to add a 15-cent surcharge to the existing city ride-share fee of 52 cents per trip, promising that the additional revenue would be earmarked for the CTA, not used to plug the city’s budget hole. The surcharge, which will affect Lyft, Uber, and smaller competitors, would be raised 20 cents, to 72 cents total, in 2019, which wouldn’t be a hardship for rideshare users, whom research shows tend to be relatively affluent. “To ensure the CTA can continue to invest in infrastructure upgrades to its train and bus lines, Chicago will become the first city in the nation to institute a fee on the rideshare industry dedicated specifically to mass transit and mass transit improvements,” the mayor’s office said in a statement last week. The 2018

budget includes $16 million for the transit agency, funded by the ride-share hike, with $21 million expected in 2019. Asked for their perspective on the proposed fee, representatives for Lyft and Uber didn’t directly address the issue. “By encouraging residents to use a variety of options, we can all ride together to build a better Chicago,” Uber replied in a statement. Lyft spokesman Campbell Matthews wrote, “We appreciate the mayor working to build a sustainable future for ride-sharing drivers and passengers in Chicago.” The CTA will be putting out its own budget in November. It faces a number of fiscal challenges, including several funding cuts in recent years, such as a $76 million reduction in state funding for regional transit that was part of this summer’s Illinois budget deal. The transit agency also needs an estimated $13 billion to bring its existing rail and bus networks to a state of good repair. Then there are CTA ridership decreases. According to the agency’s latest monthly ridership report, released in May, the year-to-date total for bus and rail ridership had declined by 4.3 percent compared to 2017, including a 3.6 percent drop in rail ridership and a 4.9 decrease in bus ridership. “There are a number of factors contributing to CTA’s recent ridership declines, including historically low gas prices and the expansion of ride-hailing,” agency spokeswoman Tammy Chase says. “Preliminary analysis of recent ridership shows that declines have been more pronounced in the late-evening and early-morning hours. AM and PM rush ridership has been less impacted, but has still seen some declines.” The drop in ridership is in keeping with the

ﬁndings of a new study from the University of California, Davis, which randomly surveyed more than 4,000 urban and suburban residents in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, D.C., and Boston. The report found that ride-share users heavily skew younger, college educated, and affluent–33 percent of respondents who make $150,000 a year or more said they use ride share, while only 15 percent of those who make $30,000 or less said they do so. According to the study, ride share seems to be having a modest positive effect on car ownership, with 9 percent of respondents who use the service reporting that it influenced a decision not to buy a car, or to sell one they previously owned. However, those who got rid of a vehicle have replaced those private car trips with additional ride-share use, and it’s not known what effect this has had on net vehicle miles traveled. The report found that after beginning to use ride share, people were 6 percent less likely to ride buses and 3 percent less likely to use light rail. Interestingly, respondents were 3 percent more likely to use commuter rail such as Metra, which suggests a complementary rather than competitive relationship, with commuters using the service for “last mile” trips to and from stations. According to the study, ride-share trips are often replacing more space-efficient transportation modes—49 percent to 62 percent of these journeys would have otherwise been made by transit, walking, biking, or not at all. This indicates that ride share is adding to congestion in cities. “Based on mode substitution and ride-hailing frequency of use data, we conclude that ride-hailing is currently likely to contribute to growth in vehicle miles traveled

in the major cities represented in this study,” the researchers state. The ﬁndings don’t bode well for the future of transit. When people who can afford to take Uber or Lyft choose to do so because it’s quicker and more dependable than buses or trains, that means more cars on the road, which could in turn slow down buses and lead to transit revenue shortfalls, resulting in fare hikes and/ or and less frequent service. Those who can’t afford ride share may then have to deal with increasingly poor bus performance. Faced with the prospect of more transit trips being replaced by ride-share trips, the Active Transportation Alliance, in a blog post last week, applauded Emanuel’s proposal, calling it “good news for everyone who cares about preserving healthy, sustainable, and equitable transportation options across Chicago.” Government relations director Kyle Whitehead noted that the UC Davis report is in keeping with other recent studies that found ride share is reducing transit ridership and increasing congestion in New York and San Francisco. Whitehead wrote that replacing active transportation trips with car trips makes our streets more dangerous, reduces physical activity, increases greenhouse gas emissions, and disproportionately hurts the poor. He observed that if Lyft and Uber were to share their data with the public, which they’re currently not required to do in Chicago, it could help inﬂuence policies for managing ride share so that the technology does the local transportation system more good than harm. “Using revenue from a tax increase to fund public transit improvements is a step in the right direction.” Not everyone feels that way, of course. “CTA needs to raise fares to $3.00 for trains and $2.50 for buses [from $2.25 and $2, respectively] to pay for capital improvements, not . . . tax people using a non-competitive service,” wrote one Streetsblog Chicago commenter. But as the recent numbers show, ride share is, in fact, competing with rather than complementing, public transit. Uber and Lyft certainly can be handy for trips that aren’t practical by public transportation, and it’s great that the services can help reduce drunk driving and car ownership. But unless Chicago take steps to adequately fund the CTA, ride share will continue to disrupt local transit, and the city will be the worse for it. v

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

OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

Matt Taibbi ò NEILSON BARNARD

Q&A

Matt Taibbi says the case of Eric Garner proves that broken windows policing is broken By RYAN SMITH

ric Garner wasn’t much of a criminal kingpin—an affable cigarette hustler who peddled tax-free cartons of smokes and “loosies” from his chosen corner on Bay Street in Staten Island, New York. He liked it that way (“Felony money for misdemeanor time,” he called his chosen hustle). That low profile might have led the 43-year-old man’s killing at the hands of the NYPD on July 17, 2014, to have gone unnoticed by many outside of Tompkinsville Park. Instead, an observer, Ramsey Orta, videotaped it and turned it over to the New York Daily News. The footage soon went viral—countless millions watched as police officer Daniel Pantaleo held Garner in a chokehold and pinned him down on the concrete. Garner kept gasping the words “I can’t breathe” until he died. The video became a flash point in the national debate over police and the criminal justice system. Conservatives saw a 350-pound black man with a long criminal record punished for not obeying police instructions. The left encountered the most clear-cut case yet of excessive force by the police against unarmed people of color. Likewise, the Garner video helped foment the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement, as activists began adopting Garner’s final words as a rallying cry. Even NBA stars like Derrick Rose and LeBron James took to wearing “I Can’t Breathe” on T-shirts as a demonstration after a Staten Island grand jury elected not to bring criminal charges against Pantaleo in late 2014. Today, Garner is remembered more as a symbol than as a man—a problem that Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi helps correct with his essential new book I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street. Taibbi’s exhaustively reported narrative fleshes out Garner’s complicated personal life and legacy. But it also interweaves the systemic forces that led to his fatal encounter with NYPD and the current legal limbo of his family’s quest for justice. Garner’s was already being choked by forces beyond his control before Pantaleo’s arm was ever locked around his throat: draconian housing laws, the racist implementation of broken windows and stop-and-frisk policing (endorsed by Republicans and Democrats alike), the punitive nature of the decades-long war on drugs, and the slow and labyrinthine machinations of the New York court system. “Garner’s death,” Taibbi writes, “and the great distances that were traveled to protect his killer, now stand as testaments to America’s pathological desire to avoid equal treatment under the law for its black population.” Taibbi will appear on Saturday, October 28, for a book signing and an interview with attorney and Chicago Police Board president Lori Lightfoot as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. We discussed his examination of the Garner case and how a Laquan McDonald version of the book might look.

12 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

What inspired you to write about the Garner case? I had done a lot of work on the whole concept of community and broken windows policing from my previous book, The Divide, and I had spent a lot of time in courts talking to people who had been busted for minor oﬀenses. The premise of that book was that our justice system was moving in a direction where people were being very heavily punished for minor crimes while colossal ﬁnancial crimes were going on unpunished, so I had this intellectual interest in the subject. I don’t live that far from Staten Island, so I drove out to the park where Garner hung out and just started to ask people about what their feelings were about the decision by the grand jury in the case. My initial thought was just to do a Rolling Stone article about how it was an example of everything that goes wrong with community policing. But what ended up happening was that people just told me a lot of stories about Eric Garner, and I kind of liked him as a person and was really interested in him as this character and focused on that instead. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could have written for a magazine. It had to be a book. It’s a biography of Garner, but you’re also documenting the machinations of criminal justice in America and New York. It’s a small story in a bigger story. I think the concept became: This is a really interesting person who I think was really likable, and if

I described him accurately, readers would be able to connect with [him]. Through his story you see that he was kind of a [prism for] the entire recent history of the criminal justice system. He was front and center of all of the major developments going back 30 or 40 years—from mass incarceration to the inequities in sentencing between cocaine and crack and then ﬁnally broken windows, where he became the ultimate example of what they were looking for when they designed that kind of policing program. I thought his story was a way to describe all this history and issues, but in the way that was human and novelistic and something that people would be invested in. There is a lot of drama in this book, even though we know the simple version of this story and saw Garner die on video with our own eyes. It’s funny, I actually made a point of not watching the whole video until the day I had to write the death scene. I had seen a couple of little clips, but once I started learning a little bit about him, I decided I didn’t want to watch the whole thing until the moment when I had to describe what happened. In the same way, I wrote the story so that readers would still be surprised and horriﬁed by what happened even if they know what’s coming. In order to do that, I had to get deep enough into his life that people would be invested in it, even knowing that he was going to die. The video is valuable, and obviously that’s a big reason why we’re talking about this case, but it’s a limited perspective, and it seems like a lot of people viewed it through their own political prism. Your book tells a more nuanced story. The Eric Garner story in a lot of ways was the ultimate Twitter-era news story because it had this explosive video that instantly produced reactions. It evolved as a news story exactly the way almost everything else evolves: people instantly took sides and reduced everything to a series of cliches. They took their positions, dug in, and screamed at each other about it. But as amazing as (the video) was for spreading awareness about what happened and providing necessary outrage, there are limitations to that kind of journalism. Sometimes you have to go into a story and not have a preconceived idea about what happened, what things are. Garner, for instance, was consistently portrayed in the media as this pseudo vagrant who just sold loose cigarettes. But one of the first things I learned about him completely contradicted that narrative: He was actually kind of an entrepreneur who had people working for him; he had a whole operation going. We were told in the media that he was arrested for selling cigarettes. But that’s not exactly what happened—it was a lieutenant who drove by that park in the morning who probably saw Garner. Having already been yelled at because

TK caption

the block looked unpleasant in Comsat meetings, two dingbat detectives were told to go back and pick [Garner] up. They were probably ordered to arrest him regardless of what he was doing. So all this is more complicated than a 140-character summation of these stories. To me, it was an exercise in the limitations of Twitter-age journalism. Some people might assume that a liberal Rolling Stone journalist might write something hagiographic about Garner, but this book doesn’t shy away from the complications of this life. You portray him as likable and sympathetic, but you outline his many flaws too. I talked to the family about that. Specifically, I talked to Erica [Garner] and said ‘Look, I think your father is going to come away looking sympathetic in the book, but I think it’s more powerful if people know everything about him—the good parts and the bad parts.’ She said that they wanted it do it that way. I think the story is more powerful if people see him as a human being who had all sorts of things going on [in] his life. He didn’t always make the best decisions but was basically trying. Sometimes he was fighting against his own bad decision-making and bad luck—all these things were factors in what happened, but I think it made it more tragic, not less. People might think, OK, this is a liberal Rolling Stone writer—this book is going to be a broadside against the police. But while the police don’t come out looking great in the story, I think it’s really not that either. The way I look at it, cops are in an incredibly stupid bureaucratic environment that kind of drives a lot of their behavior. “I can’t breathe” were his last words, but [the phrase] also describes his life, suffocated by all of these disparate forces. The metaphor is big and clumsy, and it’s not exactly subtle, but it definitely holds. He was being squeezed from all sides. He was not safe on the street from either people on the street or from the police. His health was a problem. He was having money issues. He didn’t have a stable place to live. And he was just kind of constantly hustling to find a little bit of room for himself, and it just didn’t pan out. And in the end he literally had no place to go. You’d expect conservative politicians and some of these cops to be the villains of this story—or would at least come out the worst—but you also go after liberal politicians and intellectuals for promoting broken-windows policies. You even ding Malcolm Gladwell for normalizing some of these ideas. I think there’s no way to look into this issue and not see some culpability on the liberal, intellectual side. Anybody who’s spent a lot of time in a city like New York or Chicago or LA knows that a lot of the politicians [who] push these policies get

there with the heavy backing of liberal money and liberal coalitions. The classic formulation in New York is somebody like (former mayor Michael) Bloomberg, who’s a social liberal. He’s in favor of gay marriage, but he’s an ass kicker on the policing stuff. It became intellectual chic, not just on the right but on the left. And the funny thing is that broken windows actually does make a lot of sense if you just present it the way Malcolm Gladwell did. But the problem with broken windows is that, in practice, it looks totally identical to a lot of these horrible repressive things that went on during the period after the Civil War with the black codes. It’s just rehashing and reimagining a lot of the same policies. George Kelling, who invented this theory, wasn’t trying to fool anybody—I think he genuinely believed that it worked, and on some level it does. But the history is what makes a difference. One problem is that there’s still no single clear reason why crime dropped over the 90s and 2000s. Now all of sudden, especially in Chicago, we’ve had a spike in violent crime. On some level, the broken-windows policing in New York got a lot of credit for the drop in crime—and it may have had something to do with it—but we don’t really know. It’s the inability of social scientists to really pin down what the drop in crime can be attributed to that makes it hard, because a lot of people are presenting stop and frisk as a trade-off. This was actually argued when the policy went to court. One of the city’s main lines of defense was—well, this works. Even though they were being accused of massive civil rights violations they didn’t get up in court and say, ‘No, we didn’t do that,’ they got up and they said, ‘Yeah, well, look at the great results.’ So that’s a big problem for people to get past intellectually when they’re thinking about this stuff: It’s bad if you live in one of these neighborhoods and get thrown against the wall 40 or 50 times a year, but the trade-off is I get to go shopping in Times Square and feel safe. But I don’t necessarily think that’s true, and I think a lot of cops don’t really believe it either. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to talk to a lot of cops who were willing to speak on the record for this book, but I think most of them feel the same way: the job sucks now. The stat-chasing aspect of it, the constant shaking people down for minor violations—they don’t want to be doing that shit. They want to be, you know, busting real criminals. There’s an argument to be made that broken windows isn’t what was behind the drop in crime. If you were to write a Chicago version of this story about Laquan McDonald, do you think it would tell a similar story? Yeah, one of the reasons I didn’t do that is because New York has the infamous distinction of being ground zero for a lot of the more regressive

for these policies, the Democrats will ﬁnd a way to also be for it in the end, or at least won’t stand in the way of it happening. I think that was one of the frustrations of at least some members of the Garner family. They went into this with the expectation that they would have all sorts of advocates within the Democratic Party who would help them along the way. And they gradually became disillusioned and found that institutionally there really wasn’t a whole lot of help on either side.

policing policies. The first time they really went after crack dealers and the demonization of crack, that was New York. Mass incarceration was New York, stop and frisk was New York, so it’s appropriate to do it here. But I was in Chicago when the ACLU released their stats about Chicago’s version of stop and frisk, which I believe showed that the rate of stops was four times higher in Chicago than New York at its peak. So Chicago has a lot of the same problems as New York, and the Laquan McDonald story was very similar to the Garner story in terms of the city’s unwillingness to disclose information until well after it happened. How did you feel about Rahm’s response to that case? Politicians, and especially mayors—they’re all the same. No matter what they say, when they [take] office they always end up feeling like they need cops in order to rule the city and to be reelected. They all end up believing that the route to reelection is a drop in the crime rate, particularly to make sure certain neighborhoods are policed correctly. That’s where broken windows comes into play, because it’s such an effective tool for keeping certain kinds of people out of certain neighborhoods. And no matter how liberal you are when you come in, you end up making a deal with the devil. I think that’s part of the story here with the Garner case, where [New York City mayor Bill] de Blasio comes in as an enemy of stop and frisk but even he ends up making a devil’s bargain with [former New York City police commissioner Bill] Bratton. All these guys may talk a big game before they get elected, but eventually they feel they need the cops and the commissioners and the way to the promised land is just giving the police more leeway. Politicians like Rahm or de Blasio have a polite way of reinforcing these bad policing policies, and then you have someone like Trump who just says, “Hey, let’s double down on stop and frisk!” in this openly racist way. Trump represents an extreme end of the spectrum, but the lesson of this book is that while the Republicans with a Trump or a Giuliani might be ardent enthusiasts and unapologetic advocates

And most people’s complaint about Trump on this issue is mostly about his tone and the way he talks about it. Everything about Trump is about tone and taste. A lot of the things that he says policy-wise aren’t that far oﬀ from what we’ve seen before, it’s just that the package presented with Trump comes with this extraoﬀensive baggage. Part of the backlash that led to the Trump phenomenon was this feeling among white America that they were tired of listening to all the talk about Michael Brown and Garner and Laquan McDonald and Tamir Rice, saying, ‘Hey, cops get shot too!’ I think that emboldens politicians like Trump.

Did you learn anything talking to cops in New York City? Deﬁnitely. There were a few cops who were willing to be quoted, though not many who currently serve in Staten Island, unfortunately. But there were some who were whistleblowers in stop-and-frisk cases who are still in the police force. I don’t think anything that they told me was particularly revelatory, but the notion that seeking stats has ruined the job is something that I think a lot of cops talk about. They don’t want to be going to corners and busting people for refusing to obey a lawful order or obstructing government administration— they’re bullshit charges. One cop I talked to, Pablo Serrano, says the reverse is also true: not only are they being forced to rack up all this activity with meaningless stuﬀ, but when a felony happens they’re asked to kind of quiet that down because they’re also in charge of reporting the crime rate. So sometimes they’ll get something that’s a real burglary or a break-in and they’ll be asked to make it go away because the captain doesn’t want too many felonies in their districts. So they’re in this ridiculous position where they have to constantly hassle people, but [they’re] also disincentivized to pursue real crime. It’s everything that the job isn’t supposed to be. So I think even though there’s a lot of anger from cops about the way they’re perceived, when it comes to talking about the job, I think a lot of them feel the same way. v R I CAN’T BREATHE: A KILLING ON BAY STREET By Matt Taibbi (Penguin Random House).

v @RyanSmithWriter OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

Bloody

good

show

An unﬂinching look behind the gory scenes of Splatter Theater, the Annoyance’s savagely funny 30-year-old slasher spoof By STEVE HEISLER PHOTOS BY GILLIAN FRY 14 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

ackstage at the Annoyance Theatre in Lakeview on a recent Saturday evening, a table is arrayed with a ghastly buffet: an assortment of knives, a pair of gardening shears, plastic containers full of fake blood, a decapitated head made of foam, a pumpkin stuffed with pig intestines. Standing beside the eyebrow-raising collection of props, stirring a tub of red liquid with a wooden spoon, is Emily Spindler, the blood master for that night’s entertainment, Splatter Theater. The ﬁrst ever production the Annoyance mounted 30 years ago, Splatter Theater has become a fall theatergoing tradition—like a macabre, don’t-bring-the-kids Christmas Carol for the Halloween season. The spoof of old-school slasher movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween features archetypes such as the school jock,

the virgin, the class dick, and the bumbling police officer, all of whom are killed off by a nameless psychopath in a 90-minute spectacle of absurd gore that leaves the white walls and stark furniture of the stage, the cast’s white clothing, and even the front rows of the audience stained with fake blood. While the flimsy horror-sendup premise seems little more than an excuse to let improvisers make a big, dumb mess, a peek behind the scenes reveals the show to be a triumph of a certain schlocky stagecraft, requiring custom organ meats, multiple formulas for blood, and all manner of wearable gizmos modified to allow performers to disgorge that blood on cue. Half an hour before showtime, Spindler proudly shows off one such implement she crafted herself: a pair of glasses equipped with spouts attached via thin rubber tubing to four rubber balloons the size of clementines that are filled with fake blood. “In the past, the blood would only shoot out of the front of the glasses,” she says. “I made it so that it not only shoots out of the front, but it also drips down the eyes so it looks like they’re being pushed until they explode, like Oberyn’s death on Game of Thrones.” Spindler doesn’t fit the profile, if one exists, of someone so adept at the technical side of gore. The unassuming 24-year-old is affable and speaks with a soft voice. She graduated from Columbia College last year with a major in acting and a minor in makeup design, with a specialty in injury simulation. “I have a degree in blood and gore,” she likes to say.

SPLATTER THEATER Sat 10/28 and Tue 10/31, 10 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $20, $15 for students.

“When I was little I was always terrified of horror ﬁlms,” she says. “So in order for me to get over that fear, I would replicate the exact injuries and deaths with wax, latex, and anything similar I had around the house.” The 15-person cast gather for a preshow powwow. Spindler grabs duct tape and scissors to begin outﬁtting them to spurt blood at will. Dressed entirely in white—Tshirts, baggy pants, button-downs, jackets, even Daisy Dukes—except for the gray Crocs meant to prevent them from slipping on the red liquid that will soon be in puddles at their feet, they look more like members of a cult than a cast. While Spindler wires up the actors, they discuss the quantity of blood shed during the previous week’s show, and vow to match, if not exceed, that amount.

Alfred Hitchcock preferred chocolate syrup as a standin for blood in the famous shower scene of Psycho (the master of suspense found it to be more convincing in a black-and-white film), but Annoyance founder and artistic director Mick Napier created his own formula when he helped launch Splatter Theater three decades ago. The ratio of dye to corn syrup to chocolate syrup was passed down to Sam Locke, the previous blood master, and now to Spindler. Napier also established a chocolate-free formula for a thinner version of the blood using water and a combination of red and blue food coloring. (Red dye alone turns the blood pink, and the blue darkens it.) The watered-down version flows easier through devices such as the glasses with long, narrow tubes. During a run of Splatter, the Annoyance uses about two cases of both corn syrup and chocolate syrup and four cases of food coloring. In anticipation of the bloodbath to come, the cast line the carpeted hallway backstage with black trash bags. Near the stage entrance a large stack of freshly laundered white costumes is set next to a small pile of dirty clothing. By the show’s end, the size of these piles will be reversed. One actor, Jordan Wilson, who plays the jock in tonight’s show, is outfitted with a red hot water

bottle, a plastic tube stuck in the open end, worn like a backpack. It resembles a cross between a CamelBak hydration pack and a colostomy bag. Spindler explains that when Wilson opens the nozzle on the tube, fake blood will ﬂood his crotch as the killer stabs away at the sports star’s genitals. Death scenes rotate among the Splatter cast, and tonight it’s Parker Callahan’s turn to perform what’s become known as “the heart death.” The actor hangs a small white garbage bag with a cow heart inside around his neck, and Spindler secures it to his chest with long strips of tape. This will allow the killer to reach into Callahan’s shirt and pretend to pull out his ticker before tossing it against the wall. There’s plenty of guts in Splatter Theater, but little to no glory for actors cast in the show. Aside from a handful of lines of written dialogue in the script’s meager 14 J

OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

continued from 15

pages, the majority of the show is improvised. Most characters are snuffed out minutes after they’re introduced; the killer, who’s the star inasmuch as there is one, is wordless and wears a hockey mask throughout the show. Stage time is secondary to the quality of the performance of each death—the screeching, the writhing, the bloodshed, the ultimate collapse. When the killer beats the self-proclaimed “town dick” with a metal pipe, the victim grabs a dish-soap bottle stashed behind the couch (three chairs covered with a white sheet) and squeezes blood into the air after each swing, transforming the surface of an adjacent wall into a scarlet Jackson Pollock. As the Annoyance attempts to up Splatter’s technical ante with each year, meeting its need for grisly props is a task that’s bled beyond the theater into other corners of Chicago. Gepperth’s Meat Market in Lincoln Park annually packs sausage casings with chocolate pudding for one particularly gruesome death: the killer, making like he’s torn out his victim’s intestine, throws the sausages at the wall, leaving behind a large brown stain. Tai Nam Market, an Asian grocery store adjacent to the Annoyance’s previous location in Uptown, is an annual stop for Locke, the former blood master and current cast member who performs what he calls Splatter’s “meat-puppet bit”—when a raw chicken and a slab of beef, both attached to sticks, have vigorous intercourse. He purchases cow tongues, pig hearts, and other available offal, affectionately known to Spindler as “kill meats.” “At one point the [butcher] asked me where I was from. I told him I lived in Chicago, and he asked me again,” Locke says. “He ﬁnally said, ‘Nobody American would eat that.’” Locke explained the off cuts were for a theatrical production, and now the butchers know the drill. Annoyance owner Jennifer Estlin has taken it upon herself to wash the soiled costumes each week. When she rolls up to a Laundromat with many bags of what appear to be bloody clothes, she expects 911 calls. To Estlin’s surprise, nobody seems to care.

16 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

Despite the hyperpartisan times, the Annoyance has kept Splatter Theater a stubbornly apolitical escape from the news cycle. Even if the show tried to be topical, there are few opportunities in such a small script. Some details, however, have evolved with the times. “We used to have a milkman, which obviously wouldn’t work now,” Estlin says. “We also tweaked some [moments] with the town slut, to avoid slut shaming. Now she says she’s bisexual.” And in his two years directing Splatter, Jonald Jude Reyes has made it a point to diversify the cast. As tonight’s show draws to a close, the trash bags that line the ﬂoor, practically unseen before, can no longer be ignored. Fake blood has pooled on the polyethylene, and the actors’ Crocs now emit a squeaky, piercing tone as they move. Half the cast are onstage playing dead, while the rest are backstage prepping for cleanup, mixing bleach and warm water in large buckets. When the house lights ﬁnally come up on the carnage, the stage is even more of a mess than it appeared during the performance. Red liquid permeates every crevice: behind the hinges of the door, inside the dresser, the eyelids of cast members. “Each night, we blast heavy metal music as we clean,” Napier tells the audience. “And for some reason people like watching that. So, enjoy!” A hard-charging thrash track blares as the actors backstage rush into the light,

tossing sponges and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon to the suddenly revived corpses of their castmates. The razor-sharp odor of Clorox permeates the theater as the cast scrub and mop, congratulating each other on nailing some particularly gruesome stunts. “Dude, that was fucking great!” someone says of Callahan’s heart death. In about 20 minutes, the stage is shipshape and ready for the next massacre. But Spindler’s work begins again. She now has to collect her props, mix more blood, and send Locke back to the grocery store for more cow and pig innards. Estlin has to head to the Laundromat and once again pray no one calls the cops. She says she’ll probably need to go buy more food coloring. They always run out. v

v @steveheisler

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OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

ARTS & CULTURE CULTURE

Organizing principles By DEANNA ISAACS

othing is better at making Barack Obama look good than Donald Trump. That was painfully evident when the 44th president slipped into town earlier this month for a surprise appearance at the ﬁrst-ever Obama Foundation Training Day for future leaders. The minute he stepped onto the stage at the Gary Comer Youth Center, the contrast between what we had in our national leader and what we have now came to mind. The former president is still intelligent, elegant, able, and informed. He’s also rational. And charming: “You know, I live right around the corner,” he said, as if he just saw the lights on and dropped in. The crowd of 150 18- to 24-year-olds jumped to their feet to greet him and were clearly thrilled to participate as Obama conducted a “reverse town hall” where he asked questions and they gave answers about societal problems they intend to solve and how they’ll bring about change. “Everything we’re going to do [at the Obama Center] is aimed at empowering you,”

the onetime south-side community organizer told them, “because that’ll make the world a better place.” “This is Organizing 101,” he said. So it’s more than a little ironic that as the Obama Foundation gears up to host an even bigger event next week—an international civic leadership summit headlined by speakers like England’s Prince Harry—a fair chunk of the south-side community is busily organizing to contest various parts of its building plans. Let’s be clear: It’s not that residents don’t want the Obama Presidential Center. Everyone I’ve talked with loves the OPC and welcomes it to the south side. But the devil’s in the details: those pesky, expensive, and unexpected addons, like road closures, a fancy golf course, and the latest wrinkle, a parking garage on the Midway Plaisance. Local residents are not all convinced, for example, that laying some sod on top of a two-story hump of a parking ramp will retain the historic parkland the foundation wants to build on. They say a rush to get all these plans approved has squeezed out community input and might in the end squeeze out the community altogether. They’re worried

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Prince Harry will appear at an international civic leadership summit next week, hosted by the Obama Foundation. ò CHRIS JACKSON

about privatization, gentrification, coherent design, and economic opportunity. And they’ve got the organizing thing down: Jackson Park Watch, which started as online posts by two concerned south-side residents, announced in September that it has become a formally organized nonprofit (operating under the fiscal sponsorship of Friends of the Parks). “We were reluctantly concluding that the Obama Foundation was really not paying attention to community concerns,” says cofounder Margaret Schmid. Now JPW is raising money to hire the experts who can help it determine, for example, whether the shifting footprint of the Obama Center is cause for a legal challenge. “It’s quite stunning when you consider the legacy that they are promoting through the Obama Foundation—civic engagement and community building—that they have been completely tone-deaf to the concerns of the local community,” Schmid says. An even newer group, Save the Midway, is focused entirely on preserving the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Midway Plaisance “as an historic and vibrant park,” one that uniquely connects neighborhoods, says cofounder Michael McNamee. It’s mounted an online postcard campaign to stop the proposed garage (at savethemidway.org), a goal that’s supported by the Midway Plaisance Park Advisory Council and the Friends of the Parks, among others. And this month, the Obama Library Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, which has been fighting for a binding guarantee that the people who live near the Obama Center will be

able to stay there and benefit from the economic opportunity it promises, picked up two muscular new members: SEIU Health Care Illinois & Indiana, and the Chicago Teachers Union. Since the Obama Foundation (and, last month, Obama himself) made it clear that it has no intention of signing a community benefits agreement, the OLCBAC has turned its efforts to getting an ordinance passed by the City Council that would do the same thing, and would require the presidential center, the University of Chicago, and the city to comply. Speaking for the coalition, Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization executive director Jawanza Malone says there’s precedent: the ordinance will be loosely modeled on an agreement that was hammered out and passed by the council for the proposed Chicago Olympics. Obama Foundation Vice President Michael Strautmanis said in an e-mail last week that the foundation does not believe a Community Benefits Agreement is “the right tool because it’s not inclusive enough.” Instead, they’re including “aggressive requirements” for diversity in their construction contracts. Strautmanis also argues that the proposed parking garage on the Midway will “increase foot traffic within the community,” while it revitalizes “underutilized park space” and keeps auto “noise and pollution” out of Jackson Park. Those young leaders the Obama Foundation wants to enable don’t have to look far to see civic engagement in action. The lesson they’ll draw from it? Stay tuned. v

v @DeannaIsaacs

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

Amarillo ò SOPHIE GARCIA

THEATER

Desert oblivion By TONY ADLER

he sand I know best rings Lake Michigan and gives me a place to put my beach chair on a summer afternoon. The sand in Teatro Línea de Sombra’s Amarillo is life, death, and oblivion. Filling the stage over the course of the Mexican troupe’s powerful 70-minute piece, it signiﬁes the Chihuahuan Desert, the border territory through which thousands of undocumented immigrants trek each year hoping to reach the United States. Devised by its six cast members, directed by Jorge A. Vargas, and presented here by Chicago Shakespeare Theater as part of the first Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, Amarillo is multimedia and multidisciplinary, combining clips from preexisting documentaries with poetic, musical, dancerly

live performance (often seen on live video) to get at what the very public crisis of clandestine immigration looks and feels like from the southern side of El Norte. The show even turns into an information clearinghouse at times, identifying the sources of the clips we see, for instance, or telling us about Art Camp, aka Artesanas Campesinas (“an organization of peasant craftswomen created to manufacture silver jewelry”), or referring us to a Web address for the full text of a letter excerpted in the script. Naturally, there’s a wall. Stretching across the upstage limit of the set, it functions as both a projection screen and fetish object. A locus of fervent and thwarted dreams. A surface against which people continually throw themselves.

A young man (Raúl Mendoza) sits with his back to it at the outset, wearing jeans, running shoes, a hoodie, and a baseball cap—the international uniform of the uprooted everyman. Entering the desert will kill him even if he survives it, since the cost of an illegal crossing is always one’s identity. “I’m nobody,” he tells us in Spanish (translated into English via supertitles), but sounding like Tom Joad’s despondent brother. “My name is Luis, Pedro, Mercedes, Henrietta, I am Omar, I am Angeles, I am Yaneth. My name is José, Emanuel y Santiago. I am 17, 21, 48, 23, 12, 54, 29, 31, 25 years old. I was born in Ojinaga, in Lerdo, in Torreón, in San Luis Potosí, in Zuazua. . . . I always wear a hat, a bandanna, a cap, a sweatshirt. I went to Amarillo. I am dehydrated. I got lost in the desert. I said I would return and I have not yet arrived.” Later on he differentiates into Pedro, a teenager known for his pig-butchering skills, who comes to a birthday party, slaughters the roasting pig, and wins the heart of the birthday girl’s sister—all this and more handled in lyrical yet unpretentious passages of dance or near dance, often backed by the mesmeric,

wonderfully unexpected throat singing of Jesús Cuevas. But Pedro joins the nameless/ multinamed masses who head for Amarillo claiming that they’ll return. As Luís Alberto Urrea did in his best-known novel, Into the Beautiful North (2009), Amarillo makes a point of evoking the dislocation and forced adaptation caused by so many men leaving home. The women of the cast (Alicia Laguna, María Luna, Vianey Salinas, and Antígona González) find work to feed their families and write letters asking the U.S. government to deport their husbands. They wait and get sick of waiting. In one awful passage, we hear an actual letter from a woman who works with Art Camp. “When you left for Chicago, I was pregnant,” she writes. “I gave birth by myself, at the Tecapulco Health Center. That day you called me and told me that you’d be back soon, but it was the last time I heard from you. . . . This is not a farewell letter. . . . It is a letter to say that I work too much and see my daughter too little, but our home is standing without you . . . ” Of course, many women also elect to cross the border—that point is made too. And all the while the sand accumulates. It pours from holes in a punctured pinata, rains down from bags suspended above the stage like a ﬂock of birds headed where else but north. In Amarillo the desert is an ocean, a grave, a place to run out of water and luck, to be robbed and abandoned by a coyote, to leave your bones. Most of all, it’s the place where people go to leave themselves. v R AMARILLO Through 10/29: Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $25-$42.

v @taadler OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE Emmy Bean in Theater Oobleck’s A Memory Palace of Fear ò KRISTIN BASTA

NOW PLAYING!

THEATER

Enter a real house of horrors By JUSTIN HAYFORD

Adapted and Directed by

Heidi Stillman

From the Book by

Charles Dickens In Association with

The Actors Gymnasium

INTELLIGENT quietly powerful —Chicago Reader

lookingglasstheatre.org 312.337.0665 Cordelia Dewdney and Raymond Fox; Photo by Liz Lauren

20 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

he first half of Theater Oobleck’s A Memory Palace of Fear is ingeniously disappointing. After checking in with an officious loan officer who poses problematic questions (“Why are you?” came my way), skittish, white-haired real estate agent Constance arrives, welcoming you to the open house. It seems you’ve signed up to tour a dilapidated home, its massive cardboard facade a jumble of cliches from commercial haunted houses and bad horror movies. Constance immediately offers reassuring words: “The seller is motivated.” Once inside, you get most everything you’d expect from a low-budget Halloween attraction: dim lights, fake cobwebs, cheesy sound effects (including, of all things, Billy Daniels’s 1950 recording of “That Old Black Magic”), ﬁgures emerging from nowhere, strobes, claustrophobia. You also get a bit of lefty cheek: ghosts and goblins aren’t forcing the owners to flee, but rather a tanked economy, poor urban planning, shortsighted investment, and environmental mismanagement. It’s a silly, irony-soaked inversion of the traditional haunted house, complete with a

twist ending. But as you exit, in a ﬂurry of police sirens and barking voices, it’s easy to feel let down. Are creators Andrea Jablonski and Martha Bayne really going to turn thorny narratives about the societal forces that compromise housing security into nothing but a 25-minute goof?

If you’ve followed Theater Oobleck for even a few of its 30 years, you already know the answer. Leaving the haunted house, you enter a bare industrial space where four engrossing installations await. You can watch Gabriel X. Michael’s seemingly endless slide show of disturbingly beautiful boarded-up homes marked for demolition. You can pick up a telephone receiver and listen to messages—left for podcaster Billie Howard—describing harrowing housing experiences (hearing a neighbor commit suicide, living “trapped” in a house with an underwater mortgage, confronting a roommate who steals things and throws them in the Dumpster). You can cower before Heather Gabel’s unaccountably menacing sculpture of a tethered claw hammer and a few nails under a dimly lit blood-red tarp. Or, if you’re feeling particularly brave, you can stand before the most trauma-inducing image of all: Sara Heymann’s cut-out diorama of a perfect WASP Thanksgiving dinner. As Bayne suggests in an essay left out amid the installations, the litany of distressing realities that haunt our actual houses should make us question the political purpose of the commercial haunted house. Is it an amnesia m a c h i n e, i ts p re te n d terror erasing the true terror of, say, a Secretary of Housing bent on making public housing less livable? Suddenly, the disappointment of Oobleck’s haunted house becomes necessary to show us just how consistently and calculatedly haunted houses miss the point. v A MEMORY PALACE OF FEAR Entry every 15 minutes Sun 10/29, 6-10 PM, and Mon 10/30, 1-5 PM, Silent Funny, 4106 W. Chicago, theateroobleck.com, $10; more if you’ve got it, free if you’re broke.

Cynthia Oliver's Virago-Man Dem Residency at MANCC 2017. Photo: Chris Cameron

“A collage of witty, wild and wondrous moments. The cast is stunning.” Culturebot

Cynthia Oliver Co. COCo. Dance Theatre

Tickets $30 Regular / $24 Seniors $10 Columbia College Chicago students colum.edu/dancecenterpresents

Virago-Man Dem November 2, 3, and 4, 2017 at 7:30 p.m.

ATORINA ZOMAYA AND CLIFF ROME NOVEMBER 3

PAUL KAHAN OCTOBER 30

FOOD FOR THOUGHT TICKETS.CHICAGOHUMANITIES.ORG OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE

LIT

Isabel Allende’s sly response to anti-immigrant fear By KATE SCOTT

hilean-American author Isabel Allende is famous for using magical realism in her ﬁction, a stylistic attribute that often overshadows how deeply her stories are rooted in her personal experiences. For instance, her debut novel, The House of Spirits, was formed out of a real-life

22 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

letter to her ailing grandfather. Allende’s first cousin once removed was Salvador Allende, the controversial former president of Chile and the first Marxist to come to office in Latin America through open elections; Isabel eventually fled her home country to escape death threats from the Chilean government. That background in-

forms her latest work, In the Midst of Winter, which revolves around three strangers, stuck in a freezing New York City apartment during a massive blizzard, who gradually share important pieces of their past. The characters tell stories of fear and uncertainty related to their immigration to the U.S.—and in typical Allende fashion, experience supernatural encounters along the way. Lucia Maraz is a Chilean immigrant in her early 60s who has lived in Canada and the U.S., on and off, for more than 20 years. Although she speaks perfect English and enjoys her job teaching Latin American Studies at NYU, she’s never quite felt at home in America. “In the first few weeks, when her decision to leave Chile had hung heavy on her—there at least she could employ her sense of humor in Spanish—she had consoled herself with the certainty that everything changes,” Allende writes. Lucia’s intense empathy keeps her at odds with her landlord and boss at NYU, Richard Bowmaster. An American with roots in Brazil, Richard lives in the massive apartment upstairs from her and keeps the building unusually cold; he’s curt and seemingly unable to relate to Lucia, despite his undeniable attraction to her. On his way home during the biggest snowstorm of the season, Richard rear-ends a young woman’s car. The woman is Evelyn Ortega, a nearly mute, incredibly short, and easily terrified immigrant from Guatemala who barely stops long enough for Richard to give her his business card. When Evelyn shows up on his doorstep hours later, he calls upon Lucia to translate and help him find out what’s wrong. In the Midst of Winter mostly focuses on Lucia, Richard, and Evelyn’s lives before they were snowed in. Lucia left Chile as a young adult in the 1970s, during the Chilean coup d’etat. Her brother, Enrique, was a young and angry Marxist who sought to overthrow and dismantle any signs of capitalism in his country. His affiliations made Lucia and her family a target, and their lives were threatened if they didn’t turn Enrique over to the government. Similarly, Evelyn’s eldest brother, Gregorio, was recruited into a gang at 14 years old and was subsequently murdered. Evelyn was also attacked, and her fear for her own safety rendered her mute shortly thereafter. Evelyn’s grandmother smuggled the teenager out of Guatemala in 2008; having successfully crossed the border into the U.S., Evelyn was

picked up by border patrol but saved from deportation because she was a minor and her mother lived in Chicago. Evelyn’s panicked about being sent back to Guatemala, and her alarm isn’t a thing of the past. Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has made several attempts to prevent additional immigrants from coming to the U.S., most prominently by promising voters a wall separating Mexico from its northern neighbor, and while he hasn’t delivered on this proclamation, he continues to make it a staple of his presidency. On September 5, the Trump administration rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy that allowed minors who were born in or entered the U.S. as illegal immigrants to “receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and to be eligible for a work permit.” Despite dozens of studies showing that DACA has resulted in decreases in poverty, improvements in immigrants’ mental health and outlook, and a notable boost in the economy, Trump continues to create policies that disregard prevailing data about the beneﬁts of immigration to the U.S. Lucia and Evelyn seem to be extensions of Allende’s personal history—the author has said she’s felt like a foreigner for much of her life—but the characters of In the Midst of Winter are left with a bit of hope. After Evelyn was attacked, her grandmother took her to “the shaman Felicita, a healer and guardian of the traditions of the Maya.” The shaman gave Evelyn a psychedelic tea that rendered her ill and immobile; however, on her psychedelic trip, she saw a “mother jaguar” take her brother away safely from the bridge where he died. When the shaman asked her what she saw, she was able to speak again. It’s a wondrous scene, an example of how Allende uses imagination to help readers gain a better understanding of what the immigrant experience is really like for many people in this country. v R IN THE MIDST OF WINTER By Isabel Allende (Atria). Women & Children First hosts an interview with Allende conducted by author Luís Alberto Urrea Thu 11/2, 7 PM, Senn High School Auditorium, 5900 N. Glenwood, womenandchildrenfirst.com, $32, includes a presigned copy of In the Midst of Winter.

v @KateScottPhoto

ARTS & CULTURE

MOVIES

Things that go hump in the night By J.R. JONES

orror movies are endlessly popular—why are so few any good? This year has brought only one keeper (Amat Escalante’s Mexican feature The Untamed), and last year was the same (Robert Eggers’s low-budget indie The Witch). Fortunately, Halloween always prompts a few theatrical revivals of essential horror movies. On Friday at Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago Film Studies Center presents Tod Browning’s silent shocker The Unknown (1927), with live accompaniment by local musicians Kent Lambert and Sam Wagster, and on Halloween night at Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium, Chicago Film Society screens The Seventh Victim (1943), the most unnerving of the legendary B movies produced by Val Lewton at RKO Pictures. A new 4K restoration of the late George A. Romero’s epochal Night of the Living Dead (1968) opens Friday at Music Box, and Gene Siskel Film Center has a new restoration of James Whale’s overlooked gem The Old Dark House (1932). None of these relics will let you down, but The Unknown and The Old Dark House are of particular interest because they showcase the talents of Browning and Whale, two pillars of the American horror movie. In February 1931, Browning rescued Universal Pictures from bankruptcy with his runaway hit Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi as the undead count, and nine months later Whale pushed the studio further into the black with Frankenstein, featuring Boris Karloff as the monster. Whale and Browning were very different artists, the former known for his elegance and wit (in

Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man), the latter for his macabre, transgressive content (in a string of silent melodramas with Lon Chaney and later the notorious Freaks, all for MGM). Yet The Unknown and The Old Dark House share a fascination with repressed sexuality that speaks to their era and might explain why the horror genre has met with both popular success and moral condemnation. Many people know about Whale from the 1998 movie Gods and Monsters, a ﬁctionalized account of his last days (starring Ian McKellen) that stresses his professional frustrations as an openly gay man in Hollywood. The Old Dark House, by contrast, came along when Whale was enjoying his greatest industry clout, as the director of Frankenstein, and shows him beginning to experiment with the camp sensibility that would distinguish his horror projects. The movie opens with English spouses Philip (Raymond Massey) and Margaret (Gloria Stuart) bickering as they and a friend drive through the countryside in a torrential downpour. After the trio are forced off the road by a landslide, they seek shelter in a decrepit manor owned by the quivering Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger, later the sinister Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein) and his deaf, Bible-thumping sister, Rebecca (Eva Moore), and presided over by their mute and hulking butler, Morgan (Karloff in bangs and a thick beard). The Femms offer their visitors a grudging welcome, but Margaret gets a fiery sermon when Rebecca leads her to a bedroom to change out of her wet things. “They were all godless here,” Rebecca says, recalling her father and his friends, as Margaret strips down

to her slip. “They used to bring their women here. Brazen, lolling creatures in silks and satins. They filled the house with laughter and sin, laughter and sin!” As she speaks, Whale edits together close-ups of Rebecca, shot from mirrors that increasingly distort her features. “You’re wicked too!” she accuses Margaret. “Young and handsome, silly and wicked! You think of nothing but your long, straight legs and your white body, and how to please your man! You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don’t you?” After she departs, her words echo through Margaret’s mind as Whale returns to the grotesque reflections of Rebecca, this time with extreme close-ups of the brutal Morgan threaded through them. Adapted from a novel by J.B. Priestley, The Old Dark House became a Hollywood prototype with its tale of unsuspecting travelers trapped in a house full of maniacs. What gives the film real power, however, is one’s growing sense of the house not as a building but as a psyche, and of the individual characters as its emotional components. Horace Femm is fear, and Rebecca Femm is shame. Margaret in her silk slip is desire, and Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton), who arrives at the house with his girlfriend not long after the first party of travelers, is rage, still brooding over how his late wife was snubbed by his wealthy friends. When the travelers begin to explore the house, the forbidden upper floors seem like far reaches of the unconscious. Philip and Margaret, venturing upstairs, discover the siblings’ bearded, bedridden, 102-year-old father, Sir Roderick Femm, who speaks with a woman’s voice; in a perverse bit of gender-bending, Whale gave the role to actress Elspeth Dudgeon, billing her in the credits as “John Dudgeon.” Born to a working-class family in Dudley, England, Whale had gotten his start in J

RSM

Joan Crawford and Lon Chaney in The Unknown

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24 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

the British repertory theater (where he met Thesiger) and came to the U.S. as a respected stage director before going to Hollywood in 1929. Tod Browning, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, ran away from home to join a carnival, where he worked as a barker, a magician’s assistant, and, at one point, the Hypnotic Living Corpse, a role that required him to be buried alive for hours at a time. As a young actor Browning fell in with pioneering film director D.W. Griffith and moved to Los Angeles, but his days in the carnival stuck with him. At the turn of the 20th century, the carnival and the circus brought thrills and chills to small towns across America; they also supported a relatively licentious moral code that drew the ire of local religious and civic leaders. Browning understood the kind of sexual repression that drove common folk to the outskirts of town in search of sensation. By the time Browning and Chaney collaborated in the mid-20s, the film colony in Hollywood had begun flirting with the psychoanalytic concepts of Sigmund Freud, at least in their popular form. “As transmuted into an American fad, Freud’s science verged on pseudoscience,” report Browning biographers David Skal and Elias Savada. “Twenties-style psychobabble thus overlapped with the quintessentially Browning milieu of faith healing and occult hucksterism.” These muddled concepts found furious expression in Browning’s original story for The Unknown, a lurid tale of frigidity and castration anxiety. Chaney stars as Alonzo the Armless, a double amputee who performs with a big-top show, and young Joan Crawford plays his beautiful assistant, Nanon, who suffers from a creeping phobia of men’s hands. “Men! The beasts!” she exclaims at one point. “God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!” Clearly these two are a match made in heaven. The circus acts that bookend the story are weirdly sexualized. At the beginning, Alonzo sits at one end of a rotating platform, holding a rifle with his feet, while Nanon, his target, stands at the opposite end against a wall. Squeezing off perfect shots with his big toe, he cuts the shoulder straps of her gown, which drops to reveal her in shorts and a bikini top. At the end, after Nanon has gotten over her phobia and deserted Alonzo for the arms of Malabar, the Strong Man (Norman Kerry), the rejected hero plots to sabotage Malabar’s act, a surreal tableau in which the scantily clad ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

Nanon poses atop a ladder while, down below, the strongman, arms outstretched from his sides, grips in each hand a tether leading to a straining stallion (for Freud, a symbol of sexual potency). The stunt makes use of hidden treadmills beneath the horses that neutralize their movement, though Alonzo knows that the pull of a lever will halt the treadmills and Malabar’s arms will be torn from their sockets. Whale and Browning may have invented the American horror movie, but by 1941 both men had been flushed out of the movie business. Freaks, with its cast of genuinely deformed sideshow performers, was greeted with revulsion in the U.S. and banned in the UK for 30 years; Browning clawed his way back professionally and made two more notable horror movies for MGM (Mark of the Vampire, The Devil-Doll) before the studio unloaded him. Whale, a more gifted and versatile director, triumphed at Universal with Show Boat (1936), his lavish screen adaptation of the stage musical, but his antiwar movie The Road Back (1937) was ruined by meddling studio executives and proved to be a costly flop. Both men lived for several years in quiet seclusion: Whale in Pacific Palisades, where he drowned himself in his swimming pool in 1957, aged 67, and Browning in Malibu, where he rarely spoke of his movie career and died five years after Whale, at 82. A half century later, we live in a more socially liberated time, but sexual impulse has hardly diminished as an aspect of horror movies. (Spoilers ahead.) That Mexican feature The Untamed, which you can still catch next weekend at University of Chicago Doc Films, involves two women who venture into the woods outside their town to enjoy mind-bending orgasms with a strange creature from outer space. The Witch, from last year, takes place in an early Puritan community so rigid that the heroine is lured by the promise of freedom and excitement to a coven of witches in the woods, where she sheds her nightgown and dances naked in the moonlight. As The Unknown and The Old Dark House proved many years ago, no monster could be as exciting or as terrifying as the spell cast by our own bodies. v THE OLD DARK HOUSE ssss Directed by James Whale. 72 min. Fri 10/27-Wed 11/1, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11. THE UNKNOWN ssss Directed by Tod Browning. 63 min. Fri 10/27, 7 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, 773702-8596, filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu. F

v @JR_Jones

ss AVERAGE

s POOR

•

WORTHLESS

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE

Revolutions of the Night: The Enigma of Henry Darger

MOVIES

Inside the outsider By BEN SACHS

evolutions of the Night, a new documentary about famed outsider artist Henry Darger, begins like a horror movie, as two people investigate the ruins of a long-shuttered state sanatorium for children in central Illinois. With just a flashlight to lead them through the dark, the explorers observe widespread debris, then come upon a room with spattered blood dried on the walls. One senses immediately that terrible things have happened here, and several historians who appear later in the film confirm that children were mistreated at the institution throughout its existence. This miserable environment provides a clue, director Mark Stokes argues, into the psychology of Darger, who spent several years in the sanatorium until he ran away from it in adolescence. As an adult living in Chicago, in a little rented room in Lincoln Park, Darger spent decades chronicling an imaginary universe in both prose and paintings, never sharing his creations with anyone. Only after his death in 1973, at age 81, was his output discovered; many would praise the work for its disturbing, nightmarish qualities. Stokes never questions whether Darger was a great artist, though several of the interviewees, who range from art historians to Darger’s neighbors, question whether he was sane. The film’s subtitle, The Enigma of Henry Darger, refers to the mystery of what inspired him to create so prolifically when he didn’t intend his work to be seen. Stokes concludes that Darger wrote and painted compulsively to mitigate

the pain of having been abandoned as a child and endlessly abused in the state sanatorium. The documentary’s cyclical structure—which shuffles between Darger’s childhood, solitary adulthood, and posthumous success—keeps returning to his years at the sanatorium, as though Darger was unable to escape his memories of the place. That theory is certainly borne out by Darger’s work. In his imaginary world, leaders of an ignoble nation begin to enslave children, and this atrocity sets off a world war in which millions perish. The film relates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, children in American sanatoriums for the mentally disabled were forced to perform manual labor; sanatorium staff were so brutal in their corporal punishment that children often suffered lasting injuries. Revolutions of the Night is worthwhile not only as biography but as a lesson about this shameful chapter in America’s history of treating mental health. Darger may have channeled his traumatic experience into art, but Stokes makes you wonder how many other institutionalized children of Darger’s generation were lucky enough to ﬁnd catharsis or escape. v REVOLUTIONS OF THE NIGHT: THE ENIGMA OF HENRY DARGER ss Directed by Mark Stokes. 104 min. Stokes attends the screening on Sat 10/28 at 8:15 PM. Fri 10/27-Thu 11/2, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312846-2800, siskelfilm center.org, $11.

v @1bsachs OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

j JEFF DREW

Rich Jones gives a verse to the

CHICAGO MOTHMAN The cryptid of the summer speaks for itself on the rapper’s Halloween-season single. By ED BLAIR

hicago has a rich paranormal history. If the tales are true, our city has ghosts in its nightclubs (the Limelight, Excalibur, and Castle Chicago, all in the old Chicago Historical Society building on Dearborn), in its hotels (the Congress Plaza Hotel reputedly throngs with spirits, including those of Al Capone and a murdered peg-legged hobo), and obviously in its graveyards (most famously, Resurrection Cemetery in southwest-suburban Justice is ground zero for sightings of a phantom hitchhiking woman nicknamed Resurrection Mary, who’s been appearing since the 1930s). Even against this busy backdrop, the apparent arrival of a ﬂying cryptid that dive-bombs off the Willis Tower provides a new level of excitement—especially when it has its own theme song. Chicago rapper and singer Rich Jones performed “Mothman,” his new track about the winged humanoid that’s supposedly been plaguing Chicago for much of the sum-

26 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

mer and fall, in early September at the North Coast Music Festival—or so I heard from an alleged eyewitness, Reader staff writer Leor Galil. His account of the song, like most eyewitness reports of cryptids, provided limited evidence for what he claimed to have experienced—he sent me a photograph of Jones performing in front of a red-eyed illustration that could’ve been the creature, but there was no audio and no video. The track hadn’t been released. In short, I had only Leor’s word about its existence. What about the 16,000 or so other people who attended North Coast that day? Surely many of them had passed within earshot of Jones’s set. Why was there no shaky bootleg video, recorded with an iPad held aloft? Was Leor part of a localized mass hallucination? And in that case, why were there no other reports from people convinced they’d witnessed the same thing? Photographs can be faked. I had to ﬁnd out more. I had to get proof.

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here. I’ve been interested in the Chicago Mothman, which I’ve been calling the Lake Michigan Bat Creature, since June 30, 2017—that’s when it was supposedly sighted in my neighborhood, outside Logan Square bar the Owl. In late July, a friend sent me a recap of sightings published by Riot Fest’s magazine, and I was thrilled by how close together many of them were. Most supposed witnesses describe the monster as a giant humanoid bat, but some report seeing a huge owl, a creature with “jagged and insectlike” wings and the “body form of a mantis,” or a cryptid resembling West Virginia’s famous Mothman from 1966. Similar sightings in Chicagoland date back to 2011, but they’ve undergone a remarkable uptick this year. Many of these sightings have been catalogued by Lon Strickler of the website Phantoms and Monsters, who lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania. According to a map he’s created, we’re now up to 58 sightings—55 of them

in 2017. Most have occurred relatively close to the lakefront, though suburbs such as Tinley Park and Bolingbrook have seen one-off outliers. The majority of witnesses agree that the creature has red eyes, that it’s seven to eight feet tall, and that they experienced a strong feeling of fear or foreboding when they encountered it. The Reader’s own Aimee Levitt covered the flying humanoid in August, and the Tribune and Playboy have published investigations as well. As far as I know, Rich Jones is the first to address the sightings with music—but even if “Mothman” isn’t the first song about the monster, I’m wi willing to bet it’s the first with a verse fr from the monster’s point of view. Un Unlike the Bat Creature, Jones has a pu publicist, so tracking him down for a te telephone interview wasn’t difficult. Si Since this summer, when he finished “M “Mothman”—an upbeat, charming pop tu with production by Fess Grandiose tune an Nunca Duerma—Jones has been and wa waiting for the perfect time to release it. Ha Halloween season was a gimme, and as soon as this story is published, the song will be out too. Jo Jones has had a busy year. In January the Chicago native released the EP Vegas, and in June he dropped a collaboration with Mykele Deville called “No Clue.” He’s performed steadily, most notably at Lo the Logan Square Arts Festival and North Coast, and he’s been feverishly working on new music at Fat Tongue, a Logan Square studio owned by his friend Joel Gutman. Of course, he’s also made time to study the Lake Michigan Bat Creature. “I started hearing about the creature in the middle of the summer,” Jones says. “A friend of mine had posted something on Facebook about it. Given my own personal proclivities towards urban legends and the mysterious side, I of course took an interest.” He went down a “Mothman K-hole,” he says, laughing, and in the introduction of “Mothman” he shows off some of the fruits of that research. Most folks don’t know, for instance, that the unidentified flying humanoid is theorized to have an eight-day feeding cycle. Jones was introduced to the creature cult by his friend Ross Berman, a folksinger, comedian, and professional wrestling journalist. Berman has been looking for the creature since the summer. On Monday nights in Lincoln Park—a neighborhood rich in J

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Chicago’s ﬂying humanoid has been sighted near tourist-friendly downtown landmarks as well as in far-ﬂung suburbs. j JEFF DREW

continued from 26

sightings—he records a podcast called The RAW Rebellion for WrestleZone.com, and afterward he often takes long walks home, sometimes all the way to the Loop, gazing skyward and hoping to spot something. He hasn’t had any luck yet, but he speaks fondly of the creaat ture: “It’s still the kind of thing that inspires wonder.” nFor Jones, it’s inspired not just wonre der but also a smooth creature-feature jam. “Mothman” started as a way for een him to exorcise writer’s block. “I’d been sitting on this one piece of music my friends had made for me from last fall,” ve to he says. “I just knew I was gonna have eling do something great with it. I was feeling a little stymied. At a certain point, someought, thing just clicked in my head and I thought, ‘I should write about the Mothman.’ I just xercise.’ thought, ‘This could be a fun little exercise.’ I hadn’t written any sort of story form or any sort of narrative in a long time, so I figured it would be kind of fun to tap into my other interests while approaching music.” The song unfolds mostly like a traditional horror story: he recounts a legend, then sets a group of hapless victims off in search of the monster it describes. When they end up face to face with it, though, Jones deviates from the template: his protagonists are met by a creature less interested in chowing down on human beings than with finding a way to fit into our world. (It’s a little like Sheb Wooley’s 1958 novelty hit “The Purple People Eater,” except this monster doesn’t mention wanting to join a rock ’n’ roll band.) Given that Jones describes the Mothman has having “red-ass eyes,” the song turns out surprisingly poignant, which works largely due to Jones’s earnest, relaxed vocal performance. It’s a perfect summer-slipping-into-fall song, a bit of campy soft soul with a note of melancholy. On October 3, midwestern-focused paranormal research site SingularFortean.com posted the account of an anonymous local witch, who proposed that a ritual she’d conducted with her partner at Fargo Beach in Rogers Park during the so-called blood moon of September 2015 might have opened a door for these creatures. (Depending on who you believe, the plural “creatures” is entirely apt. In May near Navy Pier, witnesses reported a pair flying together.) Originally the witch had designed the ceremony to honor the lake and the moon, but due to a premonition that “the veil between worlds was becoming permeable,” she changed the spell to create

28 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

e a portal. She remembers “dark, shadowy things seemingly pouring out of the doorway” while conducting her incantation, but she feels warmly toward the shadows. She advises trying to establish a relationship with the creatures, believing they’re here to help—though this conviction puts her in a tiny minority. Jones joins her in that belief—or at least that’s how he feels about the monster in his song. “I wanted to put a quasi-positive spin on it,” he says, “and make it sound like he’s not the worst thing in the world—if he even is a ‘he’! I wanted to make the moth creature slightly sympathetic.” Even before the Mothman speaks on its own behalf, Jones notes that it’s a lonely thing, without a support network: “Never known to have affiliated with the Masons, has no patron, has no matron.” The second verse is all creature, with Jones singing through a Helicon voice modulator to create its deep, fuzzed-out speech. “I originally was approaching this record as more of a straightforward general ‘emotion’ record, not really being speciﬁc to anything. That verse is actually remnants of what was supposed to be a more serious vocal attempt,” Jones explains. “I was actually pretty geeked that I was able to find a way to reframe something that had been a loose string of words into something with a bit more potency and make something more interesting.”

Rich Jones ò ALEXUS MCLANE

is Jones isn’t sym simply trying to get us to sympathize with the Chicago Mothman, though. It’s more complicated than that—he suggests that the creature can portend evil without itself being evil. He may reference Superman on the hook (“Look there, up in the sky”), but it’s not a bird or a plane overhead but rather a “being whose existence may spell our doom.” Jones thinks the sightings may be connected to the famed West Virginia Mothman, which author John Keel linked to the collapse of the Silver Bridge in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, thus solidifying the notion of the creature as bad omen. When I ask Jones if he’s concerned that our homegrown humanoid might also be a grim portent, he’s cautious.

“I don’t want to speak any evil shit into existence, so I will decline to answer th that,” he says. Berman isn’t so hesitant. “I always felt the ‘Mothman’ th theory was people trying to laye previous encounters layer that people had across the coun country with whatever the hell people are seeing in Chicago I’m not ready to actually cago. i a Mothman,” he says. He call it suspec that the “bad omen” suspects aspect of the story might be our ps own psychological projection. appe “It appeared at the time when wer looking for something to we were har be a harbinger of doom, because T Donald Trump was tweeting about Ko North Korea—we had all kinds of hell going on here in the States. So people w went, ‘Clearly this Mothman is a warning! This is a sign!’ I think that stigmatizes it a little.” But Berman’s speculation stops short of any attempt to explain what the monster might actually be doing. “It doesn’t feel like this creature is trying to warn us of anything, or if it is, it just can’t communicate with us,” he says. “The only thing that will help is actually ﬁguring out what this creature is and what it wants.” When I ask Berman if he has any insight into the creature’s thought process, he demurs: “I don’t know if it really has any motivation other than survival.” He’s trying to avoid making assumptions, instead treating the creature like any other unknown animal. When I spoke to Jones, he was on his way to New York City, but when he returns, he plans to meet up with Berman and join him in his creature hunt. Even if that just means wandering along the lakefront, he’s excited—the dark pall from earlier in our talk seems to have passed. “Part of what makes these things fun is that they’re an escape from our reality, things of more measured consequence,” he says, laughing. “It’s just such a strange time—I just think having these kinds of minor escapes is a really healthy thing. Otherwise, we’ll just go crazy, and then what’s the joy in life?” v

v @ourcityburning

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BUY TICKETS AT OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of October 26

MUSIC

ALL AGES

Mara Rosenbloom ò ANTONIO

PICK OF THE WEEK

PORCAR

Warning says hello and good-bye on its only U.S. tour

THURSDAY26 Warning Thou and Vukari open. 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $23, $17 in advance. 17+ ò COURTESY THE ARTIST

WARNING, THOU, VUKARI

Thu 10/26, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $23, $17 in advance. 17+

FRIDAY27 Dim Luggage and Running open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $5. 21+

WHEN ELEGIAC DOOM band Warning take the stage at Reggie’s Rock club on October 26, it will be their first and last time playing in Chicago. The UK-based band, which formed in 1994 and disbanded for three years in the early 00s before breaking up for good in 2009, are on a brief and final return for a number of festival appearances along with this U.S. tour. Vocalist-guitarist Patrick Walker had been fielding reunion offers for some time, but as he recently told Revolver, this year was an “appropriate and convenient time” to reunite; his current outfit, 40 Watt Sun, had just completed their most recent album, 2016’s Wider Than the Sky. Warning will play their 2006 classic album Watching From a Distance (Miskatonic Foundation/Svart) in full. It’s an album steeped in massive, church-bell-heavy riffs that underpin Walker’s mournful howls—his singing never approaches any kind of Dio-like catharsis, but rather inverts that triumphant style into a drawn-out keening. The band’s pace doesn’t rise above a contemplative tempo, which allows the listener more time to wallow in Walker’s reflective, remorseful lyrics. Fans of current doom favorites Pallbearer should take note, as the Arkansas band liberally utilizes Warning’s playbook. Warning will be supported by Louisiana/California DIY stalwarts Thou and Chicago’s own Vukari. Thou’s caustic brand of viciously political sludge/doom kills live, as anyone present at one of their many Chicago-area basement shows can attest. Thou have a new full-length, Magus (Gilead Media), on the horizon, making this a potential chance to hear new material from one of metal’s most consistently thrilling acts. —ED BLAIR

30 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

Chicago four-piece Dim make the kind of shoegaze that’s allergic to the daylight. The damp and brooding industrial clang of the group’s new 12-inch, Stereo 45 (Rotted Tooth), occasionally lights up subbasements with piercing strobes, but I ﬁnd it hard to believe that the members of Dim could even make out the outlines of their footwear through so much fuzz. Many bands that have resurrected the style in recent years appear content with transforming the walls of sound associated with the genre into music that echoes its predecessors but drains some of its earlier color; Dim embrace grit and grim. This harsh buzz endows the group’s hooks with real weight even during their brightest moments. A light touch of sparkling synths on “Anyone Anymore” reverberates light amid a swirling hum, and also provides a blissful dance pulse (which, like any good danceﬂoor-worthy electronic track, feels like it ends much too soon). Dim are one of two groups celebrating new releases tonight; openers Luggage (whose drummer, Luca Cimarusti, is the Reader’s music listings guru), just dropped a cassette called Three through indie mainstay Don Giovanni. —LEOR GALIL

Mara Rosenbloom Chicago Ensemble 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15, $10 in advance. 18+ Last year New York-based pianist Mara Rosenbloom took a bold step forward with her third album, Prairie Burn (Fresh Sound New Talent), an incisive outing named for the practice of using controlled ﬁres to encourage the natural preservation and renewal of indigenous growth. Rosenbloom, who grew up near Madison, Wisconsin, thought of the process while rethinking her work following lessons from jazz pianist Connie Crothers. As she told me during an interview earlier this year, “I was sort of looking to make something that could be like that: Can we just set loose this energy and sort of let go of everything? Maybe the things that are vital—we’re gonna see if they hold, and maybe even reveal themselves.” Her music with bassist Sean Conly and drummer Chad Taylor accomplishes just that. The trio achieves an elusive chemistry and degree of spontaneous interaction that transcends mental boundaries. The compositions, especially the four-part title suite, ripple, surge, and shimmer with ruminative rigor. Rosenbloom unleashes a burnished, smoldering lyric quality on pieces that eschew linear structuring devices in favor of natural, ﬂowing developments, her deft rhythm section supporting every twist and curve. Prairie Burn ends with a couple of equally powerful solo pieces: an homage to John Lee Hooker called “I Rolled and I Tumbled” and a probing, conversational, and characteristically idiosyncratic take on the standard “There Will Never Be Another You.” In her Chicago debut she leads a trio with bass clarinetist Jason Stein and drummer Mike Reed, performing a new suite of music all about breathing. —PETER MARGASAK J

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OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

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32 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC

End the year on a high note.

Eddie Palmieri ò RAYMOND ROIG

continued from 30 Bob Dylan & His Band, Mavis Staples 7:30 PM, Wintrust Arena, 200 E. Cermak, $66.50$126.50. b Earlier this year Bob Dylan released his third consecutive collection of prerock American pop standards, Triplicate (Columbia). With 30 songs spread across three CDs, it rates as the most substantial volume yet. The album not only demonstrates that Dylan wasn’t kidding around when he started essaying tunes sung by Frank Sinatra (among countless others) a few years ago—it further reveals both his ardor for and understanding of the material. While his voice is more tattered than ever, his phrasing seems to sharpen with each passing year; there’s no missing the stinging futility in his delivery of the final line of “Stormy Weather,” or the less-than-certain optimism he injects into the post-hangover vibe of “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Although some tight brass turns up on some of the collection’s more upbeat material, he relies mostly on the lean support of his nimble working band, which cohesively bridges Dylan classics with pop standards from the Great American Songbook in live performances. On her forthcoming album If All I Was Was Black (Anti-), Mavis Staples makes clear that the civil rights battles she started fighting decades ago haven’t yet been won. Working again with producer Jeff Tweedy, she’s created the best solo album she’s done over the last couple of decades. If All I Was Was Black conveys messages of hopeful unity and sobering weariness over effectively flinty arrangements, some of which seethe with righteous anger. Straight out of the gate on album opener “Little Bit,” she addresses the horrific wave of police murders of unarmed blacks, singing through gritted teeth, “Poor kid they caught him / without his license / That ain’t why they shot him / They say he was fighting.” On “We Go High,” she borrows

one of Michelle Obama’s famous lines “When they go low, we go high,” entreating listeners to embrace people with wildly diﬀering worldviews with unconditional love—a sentiment that feels remarkable in a time where the country is so divided. —PETER MARGASAK

Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Band 7 and 9:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, $50, $48 members. b Eddie Palmieri will turn 81 in December, but the pianist and bandleader hardly seems ready for retirement. As one of the most revolutionary and paradigm-shifting figures in the history of Latin music, he’s certainly earned the right to take it easy, and while he’s definitely quieted down on the recording front, this year’s Sabiduría/Wisdom (Ropeadope)— his first new studio album in a dozen years—makes it clear his work isn’t finished. Working with a fiery new band of virtuosos including jazz heavies such as bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Obed Calvaire, Palmieri dives into a batch of originals from some of the angles he’s utilized over decades of musical innovation, melding soul, funk, and jazz with heavy salsa forms. The arrangements are highlighted by a cavalcade of guest musicians, such as violinist Alfredo de la Fe, whose wonderfully abraded lines spark the smoldering opener, “Cuerdas y Tumbao,” and vibraphonist Joe Locke, who brings an unexpected luminescence to the cha-cha “La Cancha.” It doesn’t all work: the presence of drummer Bernard Purdie, electric guitarist David Spinoza, and bassist Marcus Miller on the title track pushes it toward glib, heavy-handed jazz-funk. On the solo piano track “Life,” Palmieri digs into his instrument, undertaking an intense journey by turns elegiac, stormy, and triumphant while accompanying himself with spontaneous moans and cries—as if what his fingers are articulating isn’t quite enough. For these intimate performances he leads a septet. —PETER MARGASAK J

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MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

continued from 33

SUNDAY29 Insane Clown Posse R.A. the Rugged Man and Lyte open. 6:30 PM, Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, $30-$50. b The general public loves using long-running Detroit hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse and their fans, better known as Juggalos, as avatars for just about anything convenient to its cause. After Trump narrowly won Michigan, a battleground state, in the 2016 election, I noticed handfuls of Twitter users blaming Juggalos (who, generally speaking, are white and blue-collar) when in fact white folks from all walks of life played a part in securing the state’s electoral votes for that orange buffoon. In September, when Trump superfans decided to hold a last-minute “Mother of All Rallies” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on the same day the Lincoln Memorial hosted the Juggalo March on Washington in protest of the FBI’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment, in which ICP fans were called a “hybrid gang,” well, leftists got down with the clown. And don’t forget the streams of journalists who’ve gawked at the spectacle of Juggalo culture: the worst of their efforts are narcissistic stabs at literary relevance disguised as pseudosociological studies (hello, Nathan Rabin), the better ones self-aware in their attempts to capture the tribe’s ludicrousness (as the Ringer deftly noted). Most reports of the Juggalo March had one central thesis, which was “Look at these goobers.” When it comes to capturing Juggalo culture, it’s best to go straight to the source: ICP’s music. Tonight they’ll perform their cultural high-water mark, 1997’s The Great Milenko, their fourth studio album, significant for having been pulled from stores by Disney’s Hollywood Records within 24 hours of its release— and for being their first release to go platinum (you know what they say about bad press). Musically, the album helped bridge the gap between rap and heavy rock just as nu-metal was turning into a phenomenon (with a little assistance from guests such as the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones on “Piggy Pie” and Slash on “Hall of Illusions”), and lyrically found the band perfecting their mix of silly horrorcore, anti-establishment ethos, and ripe juvenile “humor.” ICP also saw power in being misunderstood misfits, and they laid it out by sketching out caricatures of their fans on “What is a Juggalo?” Sure, some ICP fans fit some trashy stereotypes, but most Juggalos are more self-aware than people give them credit for—and because of that quality, they get the last laugh. —LEOR GALIL

the Family’s helter-skelter, but at that point any occult rock was thought to be a hard sell to mainstream America. Someone was listening, though— front woman Jinx Dawson has always held just short of accusing Black Sabbath of plagiarism, and it looks to me like she has a good case. Coven never had the musical heaviness of Sabbath; what they had was Dawson herself, a self-declared Left Hand Path practitioner whose voice and charisma and daring were the cornerstone of the band’s very 60s sexy Black Mass aesthetic—sincerity counts. Dawson was just in her late teens when she recorded Witchcraft, and through a long fallow period she’s never veered from her convictions. Afterward, Dawson scored one really big hit in 1971 (and again in 1973) with the song “One Tin Soldier” from the movie Billy Jack, but when the band went on hiatus in the mid-1970s, she fell into obscurity, never getting her dues. Coven began their official comeback in 2013 with a new album, Jinx—which has a delirious Hammer Horrorcabaret aesthetic—and once again resurrected the Coven name last year with a new lineup drawn from the occult-industrial-metal band Wolfpack 44 and a heavy two-song EP, Light the Fire. If you go to tonight’s show, throw the horns guilt free—I bet even the ghost of Ronnie James Dio would be happy to acknowledge that Dawson was probably the ﬁrst to bring it into metal, no matter how many times Gene Simmons claims that title. —MONICA KENDRICK

Kevin Drumm 9 PM, Silent Funny, 4106 W. Chicago, $10 suggested donation. b If there’s a more efficient and affordable way to build a high-quality experimental music collection than subscribing to Kevin Drumm’s Bandcamp page, I don’t know about it. Over the last couple of years he’s produced new work at a prodigious clip, releasing multiple titles each month that alternate between restrained, deeply resonant drones, furious noise excursions, and deliciously tactile experiments in dynamics. His rapidly expanding body of work has shown that he’s a restless cre-

TUESDAY31 Coven The Skull and High Priest open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $25. 18+ This Chicago band’s 1969 debut, Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, had the misfortune of being pulled from distribution shortly after the Manson murders. The woman-driven Satanic majesty of the band’s ritualistic psych rock had nothing to do with

34 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

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ator who’s seriously invested in trying new things within his abstract milieu. Drumm’s latest offering, October (Early Warning), is composed of hovering long tones with gently undulating strands of sound that are woven together like endlessly unspooling rope. His prolific schedule in the digital realm hasn’t staunched the flow of physical releases; last year he compiled a characteristically disparate array of material in a hard-hitting five-CD box set titled Elapsed Time (Sonoris). Unfortunately, while Drumm’s recorded output has been voluminous, his local performances have been rare—until fall 2015, he hadn’t given a formal Chicago concert in nearly a decade. I’m thrilled that he’s been coaxed to perform again, this time as part of the final night of A Memory Palace of Fear, an immersive haunted-house installation curated by Martha Bayne and Andrea Jablonski (among others) and produced by Theater Oobleck. —PETER MARGASAK

Cut Worms Part of Nick Lowe’s Quality Rock ’n’ Roll Revue. Nick Lowe headlines; Los Straitjackets and Cut Worms open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $35, $30 in advance. 21+ The latest EP by Cut Worms, Alien Sunset (Jagjaguwar), opens with “Don’t Want to Say Goodbye,” which sounds like a lost Merseybeat classic dubbed onto a beat-up old cassette. But it’s more than just a crafty imitation of a naive early-60s Brit rocker in love with the Everly Brothers—its irresistible melody would sound great in any era. Max Clarke began making music as Cut Worms before leaving Chicago for New York in October 2015, and he recorded the six ditties on Alien Sunset with an eight-track tape machine—side A here, side B there. The more recent tunes feel less bound to such a speciﬁc time period—album closer “Song of the Highest Tower” makes it obvious that Clarke loves the strummy J

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continued from 35

elegance of Lou Reed’s songs on the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album, but he’s not recreating it. A Cut Worms studio album is in the can, due for release next year, and though I’m curious whether a more professional product will have the no-frills charm of these home recordings, I’m pretty conﬁdent Clarke knows how to write hooky songs. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY1 Wayfaring 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ Before clarinetist James Falzone relocated from Chicago to Seattle last fall to pursue a teaching position, he cemented Wayfaring, his duo with bassist and singer Katie Ernst, with a performance at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. The musicians also recorded a stunning record, I Move, You Move, which was recently released by Allos Documents. Modern jazz history is rife with strong duos, but Wayfaring stands out by, channeling ideas from American folk tradition or the church (where both musicians have spent signiﬁcant time performing) into music that extends well beyond the language of jazz. While she’s best known as a bassist, Ernst is also a formidable singer—whether tracing wordless melodies or singing folk standards like “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” or “Wayfaring Stranger,” she delivers lyrical shapes with exquisite, unembellished focus. Her intonation is thrillingly precise, and when she improvises, as on the title track, she recalls the time-stopping mastery of Jeanne Lee’s duets with pianist Ran Blake—except that she’s simultaneously intertwining her lean, woody bass lines with Falzone’s swooping, clean-toned clarinet curlicues. She doesn’t sing on everything: “Alton Sterling” is a driving postbop burner where Ernst’s propulsion obviates any need for a drummer, while “Tanka” is a concise three-part marvel that moves from hypnotic long tones to abstract voice-and-clarinet ﬂutters to intimate chamber playing where refined lines intersect in high-level dialogue. An unex-

pected cover of My Brightest Diamond’s “This Is My Hand” juggles shruti box drones and intensity embroidered by Falzone’s jaunty Paiute flute passages while Ernst brings a tactile heft to her faultless elocution. Falzone’s recitation of the Thomas Merton poem “In Silence” feels a bit too earnest against Ernst’s easy delivery, but she brings welcome balance by melodically echoing certain words. —PETER MARGASAK

YOung Thug 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out. 18+ A couple months before he dropped June’s Beautiful Thugger Girls (300/Atlantic), Young Thug tweeted it would be his “singing album.” But to expect Thug would follow any traditional concept of singing would be to ignore his track record of eschewing what had been generally accepted as rap’s norms. As he rose to fame he didn’t just blur rapping and singing, he rearranged words at their molecular level to render even the most rote turns of phrase alive, for example, slowly wringing the words “play with my money” on “Wyclef Jean” off last year’s Jeffery. All of which is to say that Thug’s singing on Beautiful Thugger Girls sounds a lot like his rapping, which, even in this era of rappers singing like rock stars (Lil Uzi Vert, Post Malone, and Lil Peep, to name a few), still sounds like no one else. His voice has so much grit and grain to it that he brings new textures to familiar words— it’s got husk and heft, but doesn’t hold him back from sprinting through clusters of vowels easily. The instrumental touchstones here skew towards genres where singing is de rigueur, including R&B, dancehall, and pop rock. The acoustic R&B guitar melody on “Family Don’t Matter” and dancehall riddim on “Do U Love Me” cast Thug’s vocals in a new light—the musical contexts are subtle changes from his regular fare, but Thug knows how to wrangle emotion out of even the slightest differences. Beautiful Thugger Girls and his recent joint EP with EDM-survivor Carnage, Young Martha (YSL/300), offer the same old Young Thug, which is also to say there’s always something new to hear from him. —LEOR GALIL v

OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

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RESTAURANT REVIEW

Land & Lake Kitchen muddles the midwest

Mom and pop would scoﬀ at the regional cliches of LM Restaurant Group’s new spot at the LondonHouse Hotel. By AIMEE LEVITT

raveling can be a disorienting experience. After many hours in transit, you find yourself in a strange city with a landscape and street names you don’t recognize and no friends except the ones you brought with you. But if you’re lucky, your hotel will be full of people to comfort and pamper you and see to your happiness. Among those agents of comfort is the lobby restaurant.

Land & Lake Kitchen, LM Restaurant Group’s new spot at the LondonHouse Hotel, was, says its website, inspired by “the classic mom-and-pop restaurants that dotted the midwestern landscape from Iowa to Michigan throughout the 20th century.” Accordingly, there are brown leather booths. Most of the people who dine at there are hotel guests. The menu does its best to initiate them as gently as possible into the strange customs of our

region, which it tries to portray as a simple, unpretentious place. Instead of a charcuterie plate, there is a “cold cuts board.” (This conjures up an image of Oscar Meyer bologna and roast turkey rolled up with Kraft Singles on a plastic cafeteria tray, but really, it looks like a standard charcuterie plate, with thinly sliced meats, pickles, and olives.) Instead of chicken Vesuvio, there is “Chicago style baked chicken,” although this version has fava beans

instead of the usual peas. There’s a “north side hot dog” (as many visitors are presumably unaware of the existence of the White Sox); a “north woods fish fry,” aka fish and chips; and a “midwestern three-bean chili” with turkey that would break a Texan’s heart. “But where are the cheese curds?” asked my dining companion as we pored over the menu. There are no cheese curds. Instead the friedfood spot of the appetizer menu is occupied by something called “the Loop Onion Rings.” They’re made with sweet onions, not the wild onions that gave Chicago its name. There’s no deep-dish pizza, no meat loaf, no hotdish, no sweet corn on the cob, no pie under a plastic dome. There is just one casserole, cauliflower, served as a side. There is, however, Atlantic salmon (cured with Malort when it shows up on the Great Lakes Board) and, at brunch, avocado toast. We decided to order the most stereotypically midwestern food on the menu. Or, rather, we tried to pretend we were people from the east coast who were pretending they were eating in a diner in Iowa City or Springfield, Illinois, although they had never been to either place. (If they had, they would order a loose-meat sandwich or a horseshoe in order to demonstrate their knowledge of local customs.) The macaroni and cheese was great. It tasted the way you remember Kraft mac ’n’ cheese tasting, with all the chemicals edited out. When you pull out a single noodle, it’s followed by strings of melted cheese. I suspect the chef, Tim Davidson, knows it’s his best dish because it shows up not once, but three times on the menu: served plain as an appetizer, with pulled pork as an entree, and with bacon, sausage, and a sunny-side up egg at brunch. The rest of our meal just made us sad. The hamburger was Big Mac style, except without the third slice of bun, and with Thousand Island dressing instead of special sauce. The patties were overcooked but lacked the crisp edges of a really good diner burger, and the whole thing was unforgivably bland. (It also cost approximately three times more than a Big Mac.) The fries that came with it were soggy. The London broil somehow managed to be at once both tasteless and overspiced. Upon further analysis, it appeared that the meat had no flavor at all, and somebody had tried to compensate by putting a lot of overseasoned chimichurri on top. As we picked over our main courses, my J

OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 39

○ Watch a video of Joshua Marrelli working with aji amarillo in the kitchen—and get the recipe—at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK

continued from 39

friend and I tried to ﬁgure out the logic behind the menu. It made us philosophical about the nature of midwestern food. OK, so the midwest is associated with humility and a lack of pretension. But why do these ideals, especially when applied to food, result in bland, boring dishes? Why can’t midwestern food assert itself proudly, with big, juicy hunks of beef and pork and fresh vegetables, with some of the spices immigrants brought over? My friend was sad about this self-abnegation. She’s from New Mexico. They are proud of their food there, even in the lousiest hotel restaurant. She decided to drown her sadness with a second drink. The drinks menu, by the way, is the most solidly midwestern part of the whole thing, with a lengthy list of regional beers. The dessert offerings are brief, just two ice cream sandwiches: strawberry on shortbread and salted caramel pretzel crunch on chocolate wafers. This made it easy to order them both. They tasted as though they had been freshly assembled; the cookies were still crisp. There was nothing especially midwestern about them except that the ice cream came from Bobtail. They made us happy. The brunch menu is also light on the midwestern theme. Bacon and eggs are universal in hotels across this great nation. The coffee is Big Shoulders and the pastrami in the beef hash comes from the Butcher & Larder. There are also Do-Rite Donuts, but those, the server reported, go quickly. I’m not sure if it’s fair to judge the brunch service because we showed up near the end, when everyone was tired and lackadaisical. The remains of a table for eight remained uncleared for about 15 minutes. The food, when it ﬁnally emerged from the kitchen, tasted like it had been sitting under a heat lamp for a while.

This wasn’t good for the scrambled eggs, or for the ham-and-cheese sandwich, which tasted more like Dijon mustard than anything else. The corn bread, asserted my dining companion, was the reason southerners look down on Yankee cooking. Land & Lake Kitchen can probably best be summed up by the PB&J French toast, which tastes like an especially gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glob of mascarpone on the top to add some sophistication. The menu promised “seasonal jam.” The jam that arrived was strawberry. It is not strawberry season. When it comes to PB&J, I’m firmly Team Strawberry over Team Grape, so I wasn’t upset about it, just puzzled. After brunch, I went upstairs to the LondonHouse lobby to use the bathroom and then sat for a while because there are comfortable chairs and a gorgeous view of the river. Maybe it was the food coma, but I kept thinking about the not-seasonal seasonal jam. Did whoever wrote the menu throw in the word “seasonal” because that’s what’s expected of ﬁne-dining restaurants these days? It was just as much a gimmick as the pretense of being a midwestern restaurant, and just as easy to see through. (Haven’t you heard we midwesterners have great bullshit detectors?) As it happens, there are quite a few restaurants in Chicago that serve excellent, thoughtful, proudly midwestern cuisine. The LondonHouse has a concierge who could presumably direct guests to any of these. If you settle for dining at Land & Lake Kitchen, it’s likely you’re a visitor who’s too tired or overwhelmed or incurious to leave the hotel. In that case, get the mac and cheese. And an ice cream sandwich. Then go exploring. v

v @aimeelevitt

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KEY INGREDIENT

Pep rally

By JULIA THIEL Grilled octopus, pommes puree, aji amarillo vinaigrette, ﬁngerling potato chips, walnut pieces, baby cilantro, and freeze-dried aji amarillo powder. ò JULIA THIEL

JI AMARILLO is a South American pepper that’s essential to Peruvian cuisine; though the name translates to “yellow pepper,” fully mature peppers are a deep orange. JOSHUA MARRELLI, chef at BAKERSFIELD WOOD-FIRED GRILL in Westmont, who was challenged to create a dish with aji amarillo by Bill Walker of the Kennison, describes it as “not super spicy . . . more of a mild, fruity pepper.” Compared to hotter peppers like the jalapeño or Fresno, he says, the flavors are more complex. Marrelli already had some dried aji amarillo powder on hand, but he wanted to try every version of the peppers he could. Finding aji amarillo paste was easy, and his spice purveyor was able to get him the dried peppers. The fresh version, however, was more of a challenge. “I had to call one of my specialty produce guys; it took him about a week to track it down,” Marrelli says. “By the time we got it, it wasn’t fresh . . . it was deﬁnitely ﬂown in from overseas. It had, like, a two-day shelf life.” After tasting the peppers raw, Marrelli diced them up, freeze-dried them with liquid nitrogen, and ground the chunks into powder. Peppers in hand, Marrelli had to decide what to do with them. “We were looking at ways they use it in classic Peruvian cuisine,” he says. “We were thinking about a grilled chicken dish, turning the aji amarillo into a sauce.” He decided on octopus instead of chicken, but did use the traditional Peruvian method of using ground walnuts to thicken

the sauce he made for it—a zippy vinaigrette rather than a heavy cream sauce. “We’re using our live-fire grill to get a nice char on the octopus, and then that sweet, fruity spice to offset some of those char flavors.” After cooking the octopus sous vide with dried aji amarillo peppers, white wine, lemon and lime zest, shallot, and garlic for several hours, Marrelli cooked it on the wood-burning grill for a few minutes until it was just slightly charred. He served it with pommes puree (because boiled potatoes are traditional in Peruvian cuisine), the aji amarillo vinaigrette, a cilantro vinaigrette with freeze-dried aji amarillo, tiny potato chips made from fingerling potatoes, walnut pieces, and fresh baby cilantro. To finish the dish, he sprinkled a little more freeze-dried aji amarillo powder over the top. “We wanted to see how many times we could repeat some of the same flavors to reinforce them,” Marrelli said. The finished dish isn’t overwhelmingly spicy, he said: “With something sweet and charred like the octopus, having a little spice to cut through it but not be so overwhelming that’s all you taste, it’s nice to reinforce the seafood and char flavor.”

WHO’S NEXT:

Marrelli has challenged DAVID PARK, chef at HANBUN (also in Westmont), to create a dish with YUZU KOSHO, a fermented paste made from chile peppers, yuzu juice and zest, and salt. v

v @juliathiel

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NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE seeks Functional Analysts for Chicago, IL to provide functional knowledge, implementation & support for FSCM. Master’s in Comp Sci/any Eng. field +2yrs exp OR Bachelor’s in Comp Sci/any Eng. field +5yrs prog exp req’d. Req’d Skills-2 yrs w/ ea: PeopleSoft FSCM (AR, Billing, GL, AM); PeopleSoft for healthcare; PeopleSoft Query; SQL; write functional requirements; Create user guide & test cases; UAT & system testing. Drug test & bkgd check req’d. Apply at: http://jobseeker.nm. org/ Requisition ID: 0029498 EOE

ENGINEERING POSITION – Joliet, IL. Amazon.com.dedc, LLC seeks candidates for the following position (multiple positions available): Project Engineer II, Job Code PEIL-2017 responsible for the deployment, re-engineering, launch, and continuous Improvement of New Technologies & Process Automation developed within World Wide Engineering Team and Regional Operational Teams related to complex material flow/transportation and human/machine efficiency problems throughout the global Amazon supply chain by utilizing Process Improvement methodologies such as Lean Process Manufacturing, Six Sigma or related performance metrics for continuous improvement, optimization and to increase efficiency within processes. Up to 75% domestic travel required to various fulfillment centers. Candidates must respond by mail referencing the specific job code to: Amazon, PO Box 81226, Seattle, Washington 98108.

QRM LOOKING FOR a Financial Engineer to analyze & optimize fin models, simulation, & capabilities for enter risk mgt firm to impr fin risk calcs & enh cl profit w/modeling of cash flows, val of fin instr, & comp of risk. Use adv fin, math, analytical, & sw model & design tech & meth to assess models of fin instr w/in QRM Analytical framework, identify code def, & dev updated data cleansing alg & fin models to end ineff, reduce errors & enh model precision. Monitor & eval mkt data w/quant & stat meas to insure data quality & integrity in modeling, assess & test new integrated risk mgt analy & cap for integrity of market data & timely & interrupted trans & insure effective & efficient impl of upgrades to fin modeling cap & systs. Req Master’s Degree in Financial Engineering. Send resumes to: Attn: JXGC, P.O. Box 61038 Chicago, IL 60606.

NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE seeks Sr. Systems Engineers for Carol Stream, IL to provide leadership & support for enterprise-wide computing systems & systems integration for academic medical centers. Bachelor’s in Comp Sci or Info Tech +7yrs exp req’d. Req’d Skills- 2yrs w/ ea: enterprise healthcare sys mgmt; SCCM admin & app deployment; design app for Citrix XenApp & Xendesktop; AdminStudio; PowerShell; VB Script; SQL Server Admin; Active Directory; Group Policy; VMware; MDT; networking; Bit Locker; Solar Winds/ SCOM. Drug test & bkgd check req’d. Apply at: http://jobseeker.nm.org/ Requisition ID: 0029505 EOE

42 CHICAGO READER | OCTOBER 26, 2017

HOUSING RESOURCE SPECIALIST with nonprofit Heartland Human Care Services. 4411 N Ravenswood Ave. Chicago, IL 60640. Provide technical assistance, information and referral, advocacy and resource development for Agency program participants and related service providers. Travel 50% throughout Chicago Metro Area. Resumes to rguzman@heartlandalliance. org.

1BR, 7910 S. Ridgeland,

$600$850. Section 8 welcome. 2BR, 1633 E. 83rd St., $800. 312-493-2344

STUDIO $600-$699 CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone /cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

RIVERDALE, new decor 1 & 3BR avail, heat, water, appls, nr metro, many amenities. $700 & $900/mo. No Pets. No Smoke. 708-841-8094

STUDIO $700-$899

CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis. Studio/1BR Apartments.

FIRST 2 MONTHS FREE RENT. $850/month. Move in now or 11/1. Blocks to lake. FREE UTIL except $150 a/c for whole summer. Laundry in building. Bike room. Nonsmoking. Cats only. 755 W Buena. Call/text 847-778-2434. ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near Loyola Park, 1329 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $900950/month. Available 12/1. 773-7614318.

SALES NATUS MEDICAL in Pleasanton, CA seeks a DISTRICT SALES MANAGER responsible for selling products to customers. Remote work oppt. w/n IL, IA or WI and 80% travel w/n IL, IA or WI. Apply at www.natus.com

REAL ESTATE RENTALS STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-3880170

SOUTH SHORE 6724 S. Chappel Ave. Studio, 1 and 2BRs. Heat incl, nr park and great trans. $525-$875. 773-288-4444

$475-$570/mo. Call 773-955-5106

NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204 CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957

83rd & Loomis, large 1BR & 2BR apts, newly remodeled, hdwd flrs, appls & heat incl $750 & $850 plus $350 move in fee 773-507-8534. LARGE 1 BR hdwd floors, updated kitchen, ceiling fan, secure bldg, heat & hot water incl $795 /mo + move in fee 773-233-6673 735 N. LOREL. 4rms, 1BR, Fresh rehabbed, new appliances, new heat and water incl. $750/mo + 2 mo sec. 847-451-1669

SOUTH SHORE, 75th & Saginaw Ave., 1 & 2 BR apartment for rent, hdwd flrs, heat, & appl incl, $700- $900, 312-403-8025

1 BR $800-$899 2 MONTHS FREE 6600 S. Ingleside, 1 & 2 Bedrooms, $850-$1000 Free heat and Laundry Room, Sec 8 OK. Niki 773.808-2043. www.livenovo.com

LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT near Warren Park, 6802 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. Available 12/1. $725/month. 773-761-4318

CHICAGO 70TH & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry, Heat incl. Sec. 8 Ok Starting at $720/mo 773-510-9290 7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

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

BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

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

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

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

1 MONTH FREE South Shore Studios $600-$750 Free Heat, Fitness Ctr, Lndry rm. Niki 773.808. 2043 www.livenovo.com

1 BR UNDER $700 7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impeccably Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park. Laundry & Security on Premises. Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

FALL

Curriculum Developer: Oversee planning & review of curriculum, including course schedules, course materials, course goals & methodologies for a full immersion foreign language program provider (predominantly Spanish). Chicago, IL location. Req’s BA in Education & 2 yrs exp as Spanish foreign language teacher. Send resume to: Lango of Chicago South Side, Inc., 5530 S Shore Dr, #19-D, Chicago, IL, 60037, Attn: M. Marshall.

MARQUETTE PARK 7122 S Troy, Beaut. rehabbed 4BR 2BA house, fin bsmt, granite ctrs, SS appls, 2-car gar, $1650/mo 708288-4510

SAVINGS!

NEWLY

Remod. 1 BR Apts $650 w/gas incl. 2-5BR start at $650 & up. Sec 8 Welc. Rental Assistance Prog. for Qualified Applicants offer up to $200 /month for 1 yr. (773)412-1153 Wesley Realty

FALL SPECIAL: Studios starting at $499 incls utilities, 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 2BR $699, With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. 312-656-5066 or 773-287-9999

MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

BURNHAM - 14500 S. Torrence Beautiful 1 & 2 BR in a class of their own, tile flrs, appls, lndry room, a/c, heat included. 773-731-5010.

CHICAGO - $299 Move In Special! 110th & Michigan, 1BR & 2BR Apts, $580-$725/mo. Avail. now Secure building. 1-800-770-0989

û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry. Studio/1BR. $465-$525. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

FALL SPECIAL $500 Toward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. Also Homes for Rent available . 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com

232 E 121ST Pl.

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL - $300 Move in Fee - Nice lrg 1BR $565; 2BR $650 & 1 3BR $800, balcony. Sec 8 Welc. 773-995-6950

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

Ashland/ Milwaukee/ Division. Four rooms, first floor. Coachhouse. One bedroom, extra room. Hwfl, remodeled. Two blocks Blue Line, one expressway. $970. 773-710-3634.

HOMEWOOD- 1BR new kitchen, new appls, oak flrs, ac, lndry/ stor., $950/mo incls ht/prkg, near Metra. 773.743.4141 Urban Equit ies.com E ROGERS PARK: 1800 SF. 3BR / 2BA + den, new kitchen, SS appliances, FDR, $1900/heated, walk to Red Line & Beach 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT . 6824 N. Wayne. Hardwood floors. Heat included. Pets OK. Laundry in building. Available 12/1. $710/month 773-761-4318.

$650/MO. LARGE 1BR 75th & Union. Near public trans, schools and shopping, appl incl. Sect 8 Welc. 708-334-5188

1 BR $700-$799 HYDE PARK STUDIO $785. 1BR. $1095. Newly decorated, appliances, free credit check no application fee 1-773-667-6477 or 1-312-802-7301 CHATHAM CHARMER! S u n n y 1BR, 4 rms, 2nd flr, Heat incl & dbl door sec. $735/mo 708-524-0428. stevensonap artments.com BEAUTIFUL 1BR APT in Coach House. All utilities & appliances included. 1306 N. Cicero $700/mo. 773-354-2819

NORTH WEST, 1 Lrg. BR, 2nd floor. fresh paint, heat incl. $700-$750/mo. 773-716-6740

1 BR OTHER APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. Hot Summer Is Here Cool Off In The Pool OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $795.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE!! Most units Include.. HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled. Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫ MOST BEAUT. APTS! 6748 Crandon, 2BR, $875. 7727 Colfax, 2BR, $875. 6220 Eberhart, 2 & 3BR, $850-$1150. 7527 Essex, 2BR, $950 773-9478572 / 312-613-4424 SOUTH SHORE APTS: 7240-48 S Phillips 1BRs 500-650 SQ FT. Utils & heat incl, gated parking for $50/mo. Call 312-619-8517

F PALOS HILLS -REALLY NICE! E 1 bedroom, Heat/water included. Laundry facility. Close to 294 & Rt. 83. Call 708-9744493

CHICAGO, 89TH & BLACKSTONE, available now! 6 rooms, 3rd floor, heat included, need appliances, $850/mo + sec. Call 773375-9842, 1pm-6pm

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939

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

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

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

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

2 BR UNDER $900 BRIDGEPORT MINI LOFT. Two bedrooms, parking, track lighting, beamed ceiling, exposed brick, tub and shower, close to Red Line. Only $895/ month. video@bestrents.net 773-373-7368.

EDGEWATER 900SFT 1BR, new kit, sunny FDR, vintage builtins, oak flrs, Red Line, $1095/mo heated www.urbanequities.com 773-743-4141 NO. SOUTHPORT 1500SF 2BR: new kit w/deck, SS appl, oak flrs, cent heat/AC, lndry $1595+util pkg avail 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com E Rogers Park: Deluxe 1BR + den, new kitc., FDR, oak flrs close to beach. $950-1050/heated, 773743-4141 ww.urbanequities.com NORTHSIDE 1920 West Fargo Deluxe 1 Bedroom, $1025 Free heat included, Please Call 847-477-2790

1 BR $1100 AND OVER HEART OF RAVENSWOOD

FALL SPECIAL - Chicago South Side Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. $500 gift cert. for Sec 8 tenants. Also Homes for rent available. 773-287-9999. Westside Locations 773-287-4500

1 BR $900-$1099 BUCKTOWN/ WICKER PARK.

EDGEWATER 2 1/2 RM STUDIO: Full Kit, new appl, dinette, oak flrs, walk-n closets, $850/mo incls ht/gas. Call 773-743-4141 or visit www.urbanequities.com

4883 N Paulina, 1BR completely remodeled apartment, brand new kitchen with new appliances, separate dining room, ample closet space, floors sanded, painted throughout, mint condition, heat & cooking gas included. Cable, storage locker, onsite laundry. Near transportation. Must be seen. Available immediately. $1250/mo. No security deposit. Call/ text 773-230-3116 or call 773-4779251, email: herbmalkind@comcast. net

PRINTER’S ROW: $1899/MO. 1000sqft w/Lake and City views. Sublet 1BR, 1BA available 11/1/173/31/18 with option to renew. Unit features: hardwood floors, chef’s kitchen, spa bath, large master bedroom with custom closet. Side by side washer/dryer. Steps from all city transportation. Blocks from city business center, Grant Park and Lake. Call 312-771-9749.

EDGEWATER 1000SF 1BR: new kit, SS appls, quartz ctrs, built-ins, oak flrs, lndry, $1050/ heated 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com

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

CHICAGO 7600 S Essex FALL SPECIAL 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! Also Homes for rent available. Call 773-287-9999 Westside Locations 773-287-4500

2 BR UNDER $900 East Chicago, IN 2BR $675 heat incl; tenant pays utils. 1 mo. free rent w/lease. Call Malcolm 773577-9361

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

DOLTON - 14526 Cottage Grove.

BUDLONG WOODS, 5500

3BR, heat, cooking gas, water, A/C, appls, smoke free. $1040/mo + sec. Section 8 Ok. 708-846-5342

North. 2600 West, 3BR+, dining room,living room, 1.5BA +. $1600/mo incl heat. 773-784-0763

4200 BLK GRENSHAW. Secure

MAYFAIR 1600 SF 3BR, new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, onsite lndy, prkg, $1495/+ util. 773743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

Rehab, 1st flr, quiet bldg, 3BR, hdwd flrs, heat & c-fans incl. $1000/mo + 1 mo sec 773-785-5174

CHICAGO SW 1516 W. 58th St. Updated 2BR, ceramic, intercom, encl. porch/yard, quiet cul-de-sac, close to trans., $725, 312-719-3733

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo. 708-288-4510

2 BR $1100-$1299 97TH/MERRILL. Newly remod

SOUTH SHORE 2BD apt. 78th

Chappell, hardwood floors, new remodel, alarm, near transportation, schools. Section 8 approved. 1st month rent. Call 773-396-2822.

SOUTH CHICAGO, Near /Ingleside, lrg. 2BR, all flrs, large kitch/bath, dry. $800/mo. Tenant heat. 708-921-9506

82nd hdwd launpays

7000 S. Merrill 2BR, hdwd flrs, lrg FR/sunrm, new remod., cable ready, lndry, O’keefe Elem, $800/ mo. Section 8 welcome. 708-3081509, 773-493-3500

2 BEDROOM near 85th &

2BR T.H, part fin bsmt, huge backyard, 1 parking space, tenant pays utils, Sec 8 Welc. $1100. 773-731-9477

12415 NORMAL. 4BR w/appls,

NEW GARFIELD RIDGE: 4552 S Lavergne Beaut rehab 3BR, 2BA house, fin bsmt, granite ctrs, SS appls, 2 car gar., $1675/mo. 708288-4510

CALUMET PARK, 2BR House, completely remodeled, $1100/mo + security. Tenants pay own utils. Section 8 ok. 708-388-5701

AMAZING 2 BEDROOM, 1 bath

apartment on the 2nd floor that has all premium finishes! Flexible move in anytime after November 5th. Sublet through April with option to renew in May 2018. Large back deck. Laundry in basement. Easy street parking. Great neighborhood.

CHICAGO, 3BR APARTMENT, newly remodeled, heat included, $ 900/mo. Also, Storefront, $800/ mo. Call 773-297-4784

WEST ROGERS PARK: 2BR, new kit. FDR, new windows, $1295 /heated, 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

Near King Dr, 2BR, 607 E. 92nd Pl, 2nd flr $750/mo+ $500/move in fee, heat included 773-615-9042 9am-6pm

welcome. Call 312.806.1080.

2 BR $1300-$1499

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS Find a concert, buy a ticket, and sign up to get advance notice of Chicago’s essential music shows at chicagoreader.com/early.

bdrms, 2 baths units, hardwood flrs, high ceilings, granite counter, ss appliances, dishwasher, w&d in unit, private balcony, central air, intercom system, assigned parking & storage. Great location! Rent starts at $1411.00. Call Judy at 708-237-3611 for info. Avail Nov or Dec. Building located 6614 W 65th St Chicago. Special! $1000.00 off first month’s rent if you sign a lease in Oct for the month of Nov 1st or Nov 15th. 2BR APT IN newer building, com-

NEAR BEVERLY Huge 2BR on 1st floor. Sect 8

ELMHURST: Dlx 2BR, n e w appls & carpet, a/c, balcony, $1195 /mo. incl heat, prkg. OS lndry, 773743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

5104 N WOLCOTT, 1st F loor , 2BR with hardwood floors, tile bath & kitchen, newer appliances, central air & heat. Quiet, small building. Pets ok. Public transportation & shopping. Storage & coin laundry in building. $1350/mo + utilities + security deposit. 773368-4633 for more information

pletely rehabbed, laundry in unit, heat incl. 59th & California. Sec. 8 welcome. Call 773-517-9622

Escanaba, newly decorated, stove included, $550 plus 1 month security. 773-716-9554

CHATHAM - 22 East 70th St. 2BR. $750/mo. Sec 8 OK. Heat & appl. Call Office: 773-9665275 or Steve: 773-936-4749

CONSTRUCTION,

LAKE SHORE DRIVE 2 Bedroom

/ 2 Bathroom, with incredible lake views from every room. Hardwood floors, all white kitchen, full amenity building with 24 hour doorman and maintenance, indoor pool and great gym. Only $2,400 per month. Available immediately.

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME $400 Cash Move-In Bonus, No Dep.

11748 S. BISHOP. 3BR, 2BA, full finished bsmt, 20x20 covered deck, 2.5 car gar, sect 8 welc. $1500 / mo. 708-889-9749 or 708-256-0742

Chicago, 3BR, $900/mo. incl utils, near Pink Line, newly remodeled, no smoking or pets. Credit check. call 630-898-6490

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 completely rehabbed, section 8 welcome. $1450/mo + 1 month sec. 773-690-8322

Beautiful brick 4BR , 1.5 BA, off st prkg, ADP alarm $1300/ mo. Move-in Fee $650, Sec 8 Ok. 773-720-9787 or 773-483-2594

CHICAGO, 68TH & STONY ISLAND, $935/MO. 3BR, 1BA, WASHER & DRYER IN UNIT. TENANT PAYS ALL UTILITIES. CALL 858-699-5096

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

CALUMET CITY 3BR, 1.5BA, carpet, appls, window a/c, heat + cooking gas incl, $1100/mo + $1100 sec. $25 credit check fee. 708-955-2122

NEWLY DECORATED - HEAT INCL 77th/Ridgeland. 3BR. $875. 74th/East End. 2BR. $775. 773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

new carpet, paint avail immed rent 1200 + elec, gas, only sec 8 call sam 630-336-6821

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 LARGE 3 BEDROOM apartment near Wrigley Field. 3820 N. Fremont. Two bathrooms. Hardwood Floors. Cats OK. $2175/month. Special! Sign a lease starting by December 1, get January rent free! Available 12/1. 773-761-4318.

OLYMPIA FIELDS Newly remodeled 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house, full basement. Beautiful area. 708-935-7557.

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

HAZEL CREST 3BR, 1BA Ranch,

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

5621 S RACINE- 3bed 1bath

2 BR OTHER

bsmt w/ laundry. $1300/mo. 69th/ Wabash. 2BR, bsmt w/laundry. $950. No Sec Dep. 773.568-0053

ALB PK 1600SF 3BR + den, new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, onsite lndy, $1495/+ util. 773-7434141 www.urbanequities.com

BUDLONG WOODS, 5500N/ 2600W. Three bedrooms plus, two levels, DR, spacious LR, 1.5 baths plus, many closets, first floor, near transportation. $1600 includes heat. Available now. Marty, 773-784-0763.

WRIGLEYVILLE 1800 SF 3BR, Sunny New Kit, SS appl, deck, close to be ach/ Cubs park, Ldry/storage, One Month Free! $1995/heated 773-7434141 urbanequities.com

MARKHAM NEWLY REHABBED 3BR, 1BA, new appls incl washer/dryer, sec 8 welcome. Avail Immediately $1400/mo. 708-377-6374

BRONZEVILLE: SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 4841 S Michigan, 3BR apt, appls incl’d, $1200/mo. 708-288-4510.

ALBANY PK 3100W 3BR, gran. ctrs, SS appls, wood flrs, OS ldry/ stor. $1495-$1575 + utils NO DEP. 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities. com

80TH/DOBSON. Nice 2.5-3BR,

W.HUMBOLDT PK 1500W remod spac. 1BR, new kitc/appls,

225 W 108th Pl, 2BR/1BA . 7134 S. Normal, 4BR/2BA. ceiling fans, Ht & appls incl 312-683-5174

1.5BA apt, Stove, c-fans, frpl, hdwd OS lndry, storage. $825-$975 + util flrs, sec 8 welc. $985/mo. Tenant NO DEP 773-743-4141 www. pays utils. Avail Now 312-504-8592 urbanequities.com

63RD/ARTESIAN, New remod 2+BR lower w/fin bsmt & 3BR upper. Both have encl bk porch, spac LR & DR. Move-in Fee. 773.704. 0239

AUSTIN AREA Huge 6 rooms, 3BR, 1.5BA, 1st flr, hardwood floors, heat incl. $1050/mo + move-in fee. Call 773-419-3014

ADULT SERVICES

CALUMET CITY - 4BR House, 2BA, $1250/mo + sec dep. Section 8 Welcome, appliances incl, 708-638-0442 IRVING PARK & CALIFORNIA, Large 3 Bedroom, newly renovated, wood floors. Close to Brown Line, schools, good transportation. Available immediately. 773-588-0359 SEC 8 OK. 6120 S. Justine. 3BR. $1200/mo. 2 mo sec dep. 5045 W. Erie. 2BR Apt, $800/mo. Ten pay utils. No pets. 773-220-7070, Please Lv Msg, all calls returned.

CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent. Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. Call 708-752-3812 for Westside locations 773-287-4500

CHICAGO HEIGHTS, 3 OR 4BR, 1BA, NEWLY REMODELED, APPLS INCL , SECTION 8 OK. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-822-4450

GENERAL ROOM FOR RENT Logan Sq. 1917

N. Kedzie Greystone Mostly furnished, C.A., proof of income, background check, nonsmoker. $420 per month, sec. deposit $240. Looking for snow shoveler and handyman, money off the rent.

Wrigleyville 1800 S.F. 3BR, new kit, private deck & yard, FDR, oak floors, sunroom, One Month Free! $1950/ heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities. com

CHICAGO SOUTH - YOU’VE tried the rest, we are the best. Apartments & Homes for rent, city & suburb. No credit checks. 773-221-7490, 773-221-7493

ADULT SERVICES

7655 S. YATES, Clean room for adult. Bed, TV, mini-blinds, c-fans, Shared K & B, Senior discount (50+) $450/mt. (312)479-5502

non-residential SELF-STORAGE

CENTERS.

T W O locations to serve you. All units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue. 773-685-6868. South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

MUSIC & ARTS

LOOKING FOR NEW Talent: Models, Comedians, Actors, Singers seeking exposure in Hollywood. 213-373-6609, hollywoodheadliner.tv

AUDITIONS FOR NATIONAL Recording Contract. 213-373-6609 hollywoodheadliner.tv

CHICAGO, BUSY 110TH & Michigan Retail 525-1500 SqFt / $12 SqFt & office suites from $275. Move In Ready. Call Kamm, 773-520-0369

BUSINESS OPS FREE LEADS FOR life.

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STRAIGHT DOPE By Cecil Adams SLUG SIGNORINO

Q : I’m curious if the idea of artiﬁcially altering hurricanes’ strength has any scientiﬁc validity. I seem to recall that the navy gave it a try in the 70s, but that’s based on hazy memories of 11th-grade science class. —HEYHOMIE,

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Back in 1947, the government tried to weaken a hurricane off the Atlantic coast by dropping dry-ice pellets on it from military planes. Fifteen years later, in the early 1960s, the navy collaborated with the U.S. Weather Bureau on a hurricane-deterrence project called Stormfury, which sought to apply roughly the same scientiﬁc principle, replacing the dry ice with silver iodide. Storm clouds typically contain a lot of supercooled water— H2O molecules below the freezing point that nonetheless don’t form ice. The thinking went that if you could seed a hurricane with something that would cause the supercooled water to cohere into raindrops—dry ice, silver iodide, even just dust—this would release pent-up heat energy and disrupt the wall of thunderstorms that define the hurricane’s eye, thus slowing down the vortex of wind. In practice, a couple attempts showed signs of success, but further analysis suggested the hurricanes would’ve powered down on their own. The project, meanwhile, raised the ire of Fidel Castro, who accused the U.S. of trying, essentially, to weaponize the weather. Admittedly there’s something a bit Strangelovian in the image of navy fighter-bombers dumping chemical canisters into a hurricane. Couple that with an amped-up name like Stormfury, and I’ll grant it all seemed a bit nuts. Well, that was then. Now, consider the escalating costs of rebuilding American cities after more intense and more frequent hurricanes, well into the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars a pop—since 1980, the U.S. has spent $1.2 trillion on weather-related disasters. Consider, too, the compounded human misery. I’d submit we’re past the stage where nutty-sounding ideas can be dismissed out of hand. And the science behind some of these schemes is sound enough, including Stormfury-style seeding. Currently, two proposals have gained some buzz and, as important, some funding:

• Marine cloud brightening, conceived by the Brit-

ish scientists John Latham and Stephen Salter, would use a ﬂeet of pilotless yachts to spray

44 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

microscopic droplets of seawater into clouds in hurricane-forming regions, causing them to reﬂect more sunlight back into space. Hurricanes thrive on heat, so MCB (possibly combined with seeding) might dial them back too.

• Salter, meanwhile, is also behind another plan

called the Salter Sink, a floating structure that uses the power of waves to pump warm water from the ocean’s surface down a 200-yard tube to mix with the colder water below. Since, again, hurricanes rely on warm water for energy, positioning a few hundred sinks in the storm-breeding stretches of the Atlantic could have a literally chilling eﬀect on their occurrence. The concept’s still early days, but it’s received backing from the likes of Bill Gates.

Scientifically legit though these ideas may be, they’ve got critics. A chief objection is the allegedly impractical scale you’d need to enact such projects on, and the daunting associated costs. (Proponents counter that it’s still cheaper than endless rebuilding.) There’s the good old “playing God” argument, of course, which is more of a philosophical hangup. But frankly, God’s got nothing on American tort law, which is where the real obstacles to weather modification reside. Picture it: A category 5 hurricane’s headed straight for New Orleans. Science intervenes, it wobbles off course and, as a category 3 or 4, hits Houston, now a city of two million plaintiffs. And that’s if the storm stays in U.S. waters. Say it makes landfall in Mexico—now you’ve got a full-blown (as it were) international incident. Then there are even bigger concerns. Altering rainfall in the Atlantic via cloud brightening, for instance, could change weather patterns in South America, potentially drying up the Amazon rain forests. You can model this stuff all you want, but at some point somebody’ll have to pull the trigger and cross their fingers. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

The most dangerous form of breath play

A guide to choking: Don’t. Plus: the case of the Underpants Pervert

Q : Last night, my girlfriend

placed my hands around her neck and asked me to choke her. My instant reaction was to say no, not out of any objection in principle but because I thought it might be dangerous in my inexperienced hands. Later I did comply, but I was deﬁnitely holding back. I dearly love my main squeeze—clever pun there, huh?—and I want to be GGG, but . . . well, you see my misgivings. I know about safe words, but can we count on them when the recipient’s larynx is being compromised and she may be close to passing out? —CHOKE HOLDS OBLIGATE KINK EDUCATION

A : I have friends who are

professional dominants— women who will stick needles through the head of their client’s cock and post the bloody pics to Twitter—who refuse to do breath play and/ or choking scenes. “It’s impossible to control for all the variables,” said Mistress Matisse, a pro with more than 20 years of experience. “People think choking isn’t kinky, but it is. People think it’s a low-risk activity, but it’s not. Choking isn’t just about the lungs. It can affect the brain and the heart—it can affect the whole body— and if the bottom has underlying health issues, things can go disastrously wrong. I feel strongly about this.” Wrapping something around someone’s neck— your hands, a belt, a rope—is the most dangerous form of breath control/play, Matisse emphasized, and simply cannot be done safely. Fragile bones (like the hyoid bone), nerves, arteries, veins—the neck is a crowded place, it’s vulnerable, and putting sustained pressure on someone’s neck is extremely risky. Matisse also noted: “The

person doing the choking needs to be aware that they’re on the hook legally—for at least manslaughter charges—if the person who asked to be choked should die. People have gone to jail for this kind of ‘play.’” But the fact of the matter is that choking, despite the risks, is a relatively common kink, and almost all deaths related to breath play occur during solo scenes, not partnered scenes. So I’m going to give you a little advice about meeting your girlfriend’s particular needs safely, i.e., without wrapping your hands around her neck. “What most people who are into choking want is to feel controlled,” said Matisse. “So put your hand over her mouth. Grab her hair, wrap an arm around her shoulder—not her neck—and put your other hand over her mouth. That should satisfy the urge.” Another option, CHOKE, is a gas mask. If it’s not too disturbing a look, you can put a gas mask on someone, cover the breathing hole with the flat of your hand, and cut off your partner’s air. All they have to do when they need a breath is shake their head, which will break the seal created by your palm and allow them to breathe.

Q : My boyfriend of four

months is great, we’re in love, and the sex is amazing. Now for the but: A strange man takes my boyfriend out once or twice a year for a fancy lunch and gives him a lot of expensive new underwear. At these lunch “dates,” my boyfriend returns the underwear the man gave him last time, now used and worn. It seems obvious to me that Underpants Pervert is masturbating with these old pairs of underwear. This has been going on for SEVEN

YEARS, and it makes me so uncomfortable that I asked my boyfriend to stop. He agreed, but he went back on the agreement the next time Underpants Pervert snapped his ﬁngers. My boyfriend says he likes this guy, doesn’t feel objectiﬁed in a bad way, enjoys their lunches, and thinks of him as an old friend. When I see my boyfriend in his underwear, all I can think is, “That pervert is going to be masturbating into those soon,” when I should be thinking, “My boyfriend is so sexy.” You’ll probably take Underpants Pervert’s side—since you’re prokink and an older gay man yourself—and tell me to get over it. But what if I can’t?

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—HAVING ISSUES STOPPING BOYFRIEND’S UNDERPANTS MAN

PS: My boyfriend is 28 and straight. I’m a 25-year-old cis bi woman.

A : Get over it.

PS: And if you can’t get over it? Well, I guess you could issue an ultimatum, HISBUM: “It’s me or Underpants Pervert.” You would essentially be asking your boyfriend to end a successful long-term relationship (seven years)—a relationship of a different sort, yes, but a relationship nonetheless—in favor of a short-term relationship (four months). You’ve already asked your boyfriend to stop seeing this man, and he chose the perverted fag over the controlling girlfriend. If you can’t get over it and you decide to issue that ultimatum, HISBUM, don’t be surprised if he chooses the pervert over you a second time. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. v @fakedansavage

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OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

San Fermin ò DENNY RENSHAW

NEW

Anti-Flag, Stray From the Path 1/17, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Avatar, the Brains, Hellzapoppin 2/2, 6:45 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM b Black Marble 12/12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Matt Brown & Greg Reish 12/17, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM b Kenny Chesney 7/28, 5 PM, Soldier Field, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM Clan of Xymox 3/17, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Com Truise, Telaﬁn Tel Aviv 12/8, 10 PM, the Mid Al Doyle & Pat Mahoney (DJ set) 11/6, 10 PM, Smart Bar Steve Earle 1/8-9, 8 PM; 2/12-13, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/26, noon b Emancipator Ensemble 2/9, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM, 18+ Enslaved, Wolves in the Throne Room 2/23, 7 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM, 18+ Mark Farina 1/19, 10 PM, Smart Bar, part of Tomorrow Never Knows G Herbo 11/24, 6:30 PM, Portage Theater b Mary Gauthier 3/8, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Holy White Hounds 11/10, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge b Eric Johnson Electric Band 3/15, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM, 17+ Howard Jones 3/8, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/26, noon b Talib Kweli, K’Valentine 1/6, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/26, noon b

Lane 8 2/1, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 10/27, 9 AM, 18+ Lauv 2/16, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM, 18+ Lawrence Arms 12/15-16, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Local H 12/30-31, 9 PM, Subterranean, on sale Sat 10/28, 10 AM Masked Intruder 12/31, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Sat 10/28, 10 AM John Maus 2/18, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM, 18+ Sergio Mendes 2/25, 5 and 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/26, noon b Mihali 12/9, 11:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/26, noon b Moon King 1/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Nada Surf 3/13, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 10/27, 11 AM, 18+ Peter Perrett 3/5, 7:30 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 10/27, 9 AM, 17+ Taylor Phelan 12/6, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM QTY 12/4, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Rhye 3/8, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM, 17+ Rostam 2/10, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ San Fermin 2/1, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM b Seaway 1/31, 6:15 PM, Cobra Lounge b Shamir 12/5, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b JD Souther 2/11, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/26, noon b Steel House 11/5-6, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Tune-Yards 3/3, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM, 17+

46 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 26, 2017

Jon Wayne & the Pain 12/14, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Wedding Present 3/26, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM Mike Zito 12/12, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 10/27, 10 AM b

UPDATED Crystal Castles 11/10, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, canceled

UPCOMING Jessica Andrea 11/29, 7 PM, Schubas b Jessica Aszodi 12/10, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ August Burns Red, Born of Osiris 1/11, 5:30 PM, House of Blues b Avett Brothers 11/9-11, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Beach Slang, Dave Hause & the Mermaid 11/25, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Tab Benoit 12/16, 8 PM, City Winery b Big Brave 12/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Big Dipper 11/22, 9 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Big Tymers 11/4, 8 PM, Portage Theater, 18+ Black Heart Procession 11/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Blitzen Trapper 11/12, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Bully 11/7, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ John Carpenter 11/9, 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Cherubs 11/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Crowbar, Tombs 11/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Davina & the Vagabonds 1/17, 8 PM, City Winery b

b Dear Hunter, Family Crest 12/8, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Death From Above 11/4, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Dream Theater 11/3, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre EMA 11/18, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Excision 1/22, 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Flogging Molly 12/30-31, 6:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Flosstradamus 12/27, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Eleanor Friedberger 11/18, 9 PM, Hideout Liam Gallagher 11/21, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Grizzly Bear 11/29, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Guns N’ Roses 11/6, 8 PM, United Center Halsey, Partynextdoor, Charli XCX 11/19, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Hatebreed 12/3, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Hotelier 11/16, 6 PM, Cobra Lounge b I the Mighty 11/12, 7 PM, Subterranean b Iron Chic, Oﬀ With Their Heads 12/1, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Japandroids, Cloud Nothings 11/2, 8 PM, The Vic, 18+ Jay-Z 12/5, 8 PM, United Center Kelela 11/6, 8 PM, the Promontory, 18+ Kid Cudi 11/4-5, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Janelle Kroll 11/3, 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen L.A. Witch 11/12, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Phil Lesh & the Terrapin Family Band 11/15-16, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Lydia Loveless 11/15-16, 9 PM, Hideout Majid Jordan 2/21, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Jessica Lea Mayﬁeld 11/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Jon McLaughlin 12/22, 8 PM, Park West b Mountain Goats 11/17, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ No Age 1/20, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Gary Numan, Me Not You 11/29, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Angel Olsen 12/9, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Omni, Facs 11/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Parquet Courts, Meat Wave 11/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Pedestrian Deposit, Hide 11/8, 9 PM, Hideout A Perfect Circle 11/24, 8 PM, UIC Pavilion Queens of the Stone Age, Run the Jewels 12/2, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Radian 11/25, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Red Red Meat 11/22, 9 PM, Empty Bottle

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Shout Out Louds 11/8, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Silversun Pickups 11/8, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Skinny Lister 3/6, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Sleigh Bells, Sunﬂower Bean 1/31, 8 PM, Metro b Slowdive 11/5, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Thor & Friends 11/15, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Traitors, Sabella 11/12, 6 PM, Wire, Berwyn Trash Talk 11/12, 6 PM, Cobra Lounge b White Reaper 11/14, 7 PM, Metro b Andrew W.K. 5/12, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ “Weird Al” Yankovic 4/6-7, 8 PM, The Vic b Yawpers 11/11, 9 PM, Hideout Yung Lean & Sad Boys 1/31, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Zombies 3/19-20, 8 PM, City Winery b

SOLD OUT Aminé, Pell 11/18, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Brendan Bayliss & Jake Cinninger 12/15, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Andrew Bird 12/11-14, 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church b Bleachers, Bishop Briggs 11/11, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Borns 1/27, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Daniel Caesar 11/20, 9 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Greta Van Fleet 11/30, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ H.E.R. 11/9, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Jesus Lizard 12/9, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Johnnyswim 11/10, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Knox Fortune 11/13, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 17+ Mura Masa, Tennyson 11/16, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ The National 12/12-13, 7:30 PM, Lyric Opera House b Noname 11/21, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Robert Plant & the Sensational Space Shifters 2/20, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Rich Chigga 11/11, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Syd 11/8, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Grace Vanderwaal 11/15, 7 PM, Park West b Whitney, Ne-Hi 11/2, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene IT FEELS LIKE just yesterday that Steve Mizek, founder of defunct electronicmusic site Little White Earbuds, launched his Argot label. In fact it’s been more than ﬁve years—Argot grew out of Mizek’s small-run imprint, Stolen Kisses, in spring 2012. On Friday, October 27, Smart Bar hosts Argot’s belated ﬁfth birthday party, with sets from Mizek and three producers who’ve released new material through the label this year: experimental Chicago producer Hippie Priest (who dropped the full-length cassette See It Through in July), Detroit drum ’n’ bass fanatic Todd Osborn (who dropped the Elastic 68 seven-inch in May), and underground Brooklyn house artist Octo Octa (who dropped the New Paths seven-inch in April). The November candy-corn detox is a bit rough, but aside from that, Halloween season is Gossip Wolf’s favorite time of year— not least for the chance to see Chicago bands dress up and pretend to be other, more famous bands! Though Chicago Singles Club stopped producing its moreor-less-monthly online artist profiles in August 2016, the site continues to host an annual Halloween cover throwdown—and this year’s is at Cole’s on Friday, October 27. The Drases perform as Marilyn Manson, Wet Piss as Creedence Clearwater Revival, and New Drugs as Iggy Pop, while Vamos and Dan Rico team up for what they’re calling TRL IRL—which this wolf hopes includes some Britney Spears and *NSYNC! The show is technically free, but donations benefit the Hispanic Federation’s Unidos campaign for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico and the Topos de Tlaltelolco earthquake-rescue brigade in Mexico. Mute Duo, aka pedal-steel guitarist Sam Wagster (Father Costume) and drummer Skyler Rowe (Rash), celebrate the release of a self-titled CD of taut, atmospheric improvised music with a show on Friday, October 27, at Elastic. The self-released disc is limited to 100 copies, and Reader contributor Dmitry Samarov did the artwork! —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

NOVEMBER 7 • MARTYRS’

THIS FRIDAY! OCTOBER 27

LUNA

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4

SPECIAL GUESTS:

SOCCER MOMMY

BIG MOTHER GIG NEXT THURSDAY! NOVEMBER 2

NEXT WEDNESDAY! NOVEMBER 1

SPECIAL GUEST:

NOVEMBER 7 & 8

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5

JOHNNY CLEGG –Oct. 29 • GRACE VANDERWAAL – Nov. 15 - Sold Out! • TRAVELIN’ MCCOURYS-CHICAGO JAM –Nov. 19 RUGGEDLY JEWISH-BOB GARFIELD – Dec. 9 • BRENDAN & JAKE HOLIDAY SHOW – Friday, Dec. 15 TODD RUNDGREN – Dec. 16 & 17 JON MCLAUGHLIN – Friday, Dec. 22 • INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS / LEFTOVER SALMON – Feb. 16 & 17 • THE DARKNESS – April 11

JAPANDROIDS – Nov. 2 • A BOOGIE WIT DA HOODIE – Friday, Nov. 3 • ELBOW – Nov. 8 • JOHNNYSWIM – Friday, Nov. 10-Sold Out! • TURNPIKE TROUBADOURS – Saturday, Nov. 11 BLEACHERS – Nov. 12 • HOODIE ALLEN – Nov. 16 • JOHN MCLAUGHLIN/JIMMY HERRING – Nov. 17-18 • SQUEEZE – Saturday, Nov. 25 • ILIZA SHLESINGER – Friday, Dec. 1 DAMIEN ESCOBAR – Saturday, Dec 2 • RHETT & LINK – Saturday, Dec. 9 -Sold Out! • THE IRREPLACEABLES TOUR –Dec. 17 • FELIPE ESPARZA –Friday, Jan. 12 BIG HEAD TODD & THE MONSTERS Jan. 19 & 20 • BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB – Saturday, Feb. 10 • VALERIE JUNE –Feb. 15 • HIPPO CAMPUS – Friday, Feb. 16 MAJID JORDAN – Feb. 21 • CELBRATING DAVID BOWIE –Friday, Feb. 23 • OMD – Friday, Mar. 16 • PUDDLES PITY PARTY –Friday, Mar. 23 • DIXIE DREGS –Saturday, Mar. 24 “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC – Friday & Saturday, April 6 & 7 • CLEAN BANDIT – April 11 • STEVEN WILSON – May 1 & 2 • ANDREW W.K. –May 12 • THE KOOKS –May 30

BUY TICKETS AT OCTOBER 26, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 47

Soviet Art Put to the Test October 29–January 15

Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the V-A-C Foundation. Major support is provided by Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation. Additional funding is contributed by Constance R. Caplan, Karen and Jim Frank, and the Tawani Foundation. Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Neil Bluhm and the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation; Jay Franke and David Herro; Kenneth Griffin; Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy; Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff; Usha and Lakshmi N. Mittal; Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel; Thomas and Margot Pritzker; Anne and Chris Reyes; Betsy Bergman Rosenfield and Andrew M. Rosenfield; Cari and Michael J. Sacks; and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation. Generous in-kind support for this exhibition is provided by Tru Vue, Inc. and JIT Companies.