Chicago Reader print issue of October 31, 2024 (Vol. 54, No. 5) by Chicago Reader

THIS WEEK

Feature Tapping into the inﬁnite generosity of

Reader Bites Guava Linzer cookie at Nata

Renken | Haunts Chicago Haunt Builders 10 Elections Chicago’s queer community turns out to vote.

12 Elections What’s going on with the Chicago Board of Education?

14 Brown-Clark | Elections Everything you need to know about the people working the polls this election

COMMENTARY

15 Isaacs | On Culture Donald Trump’s use of language exploits “identity leadership.”

16 Reid | Review Artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s long-awaited museum retrospective

17 Cardoza | Review A Rust Belt anthology oﬀers diverse perspectives on middle America.

THEATER

18 Plays of Note Into the Woods, Rhinoceros, Seven Guitars, and Until the Flood

20 Feature An interview with longtime Reader ﬁlm critic Jonathan Rosenbaum

26 City of Win South-side rapper Ashlee Bankz makes a bold statement of self-suﬃciency.

28 Chicagoans of Note Kopano, multihyphenate cultural worker

30 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Stevie Wonder, Swirlies, Poison Girl Friend, and three-day metal festival Heavy Chicago II

34 Gossip Wolf Damager celebrate rock ’n’ roll camaraderie, the Raydiant Awards honor ordinary people doing extraordinary work, and more.

33 Jobs

33 Professionals & Services

33 Auditions

35 Savage Love Getting into the LGBTQ+ dating pool a er 40

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

CEO AND PUBLISHER SOLOMON LIEBERMAN

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES

CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN

MANAGING EDITOR SHEBA WHITE

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY

ART DIRECTOR JAMES HOSKING

PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF

GRAPHIC DESIGNER/PHOTO RESEARCHER SHIRA

FRIEDMAN-PARKS

THEATER & DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD, DRINK TARYN MCFADDEN

CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS, LITERARY ARTS KERRY CARDOZA

NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY

ASSOCIATE EDITOR/BRANDED CONTENT

SPECIALIST JAMIE LUDWIG

DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE

SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA

FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT

SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DMB (D-M BROWN)

STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE

MULTIMEDIA CONTENT PRODUCER SHAWNEE DAY

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

ASSOCIATE CHARLI RENKEN

EDITORIAL INTERN LAYLA BROWN-CLARK

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS ANN SCHOLHAMER

VICE PRESIDENT OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM

CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER BRIAN BOYER OPERATIONS ASSOCIATE LINDLEY FRENCH

CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER JIM STRUTHERS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER JOEY MANDEVILLE

DATA ASSOCIATE TATIANA PEREZ

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS CHASITY COOPER

MARKETING ASSOCIATE MAJA STACHNIK

MARKETING ASSOCIATE MICHAEL THOMPSON

CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER MARY EILEEN WEBER

VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES AMY MATHENY

SENIOR SALES REPRESENTATIVE LINDSAY FIGURSKI

SALES REPRESENTATIVE WILL ROGERS

DIGITAL SALES ASSOCIATE AYANA ROLLING

MEDIA SALES ASSOCIATE JILLIAN MUELLER

ADVERTISING

ADS@CHICAGOREADER.COM, 312-392-2970

CREATE A CLASSIFIED AD LISTING AT CLASSIFIEDS.CHICAGOREADER.COM

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS

DISTRIBUTIONISSUES@CHICAGOREADER.COM

READER INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM, INC.

CHAIRPERSON EILEEN RHODES

TREASURER TIMO MARTINEZ

SECRETARY TORRENCE GARDNER

DIRECTORS MONIQUE BRINKMAN-HILL, JULIETTE BUFORD, JAMAL DEGERATTO, DANIEL DEVER, MATT DOUBLEDAY, JAKE MIKVA, ROBERT REITER, MARILYNN RUBIO, CHRISTINA CRAWFORD STEED

READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY THE READER INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM 2930 S. MICHIGAN, SUITE 102 CHICAGO, IL 60616 312-392-2934, CHICAGOREADER.COM

Top: Birds have picked away the seeds of a sunﬂ ower. Bottom: Zo Valles holds a handful of aster seeds during the Rogers Park Seed Library seed-saving workshop. MICHELLE KANAAR FOR CHICAGO READER

PUBLISHER’S NOTE Reader Letters m

Re: “Blue line blues,” written by Reema Saleh and published in our October 24 issue (volume 54, number four)

Election Day Tue 11/5

Election Day is upon us! City of Chicago voters who wish to vote in person can do so at their assigned precinct polling place or at one of 51 vote centers throughout the city. Vote centers are in each of Chicago’s 50 aldermanic wards as well as the downtown Supersite (191 N. Clark). All of these polling sites are open on Election Day from 6 AM until 7 PM.

The next election in the City of Chicago allows you to vote on statewide referendums, county positions, judges, school board members, and of course, the president.

Go to chicagoelections.gov for polling place and registration information.

Advisory questions

In addition to three statewide advisory questions, some Chicago residents will find more referendums on their ballots depending on their ward and precinct. You can confirm your ward and precinct on your voter registration card or by filling out a form at chicagoelections.gov. Voter response to these questions will help lawmakers determine public sentiment toward the outcomes.

A small group of voters in Ward 29 will be asked about providing taxpayer subsidy to the Chicago Bears to build a new stadium, while in Ward 47, voters in the ninth precinct will be asked about the prohibition of retail sale of alcohol in their area.

School Board candidates remain on all Chicago voter's ballots. For more information about those running, check out our school board election guide at chicagoreader.com. v

Didn’t they just do a huge amount of track renovation/replacement on that branch? Why would there still be all those slow zones? —ZR G Briggs, via Facebook

The CTA has money for fancy stations but no money to replace track. Makes sense. —Yomikeprest, via Threads

Service is unreliable. When you get a train, it’s packed to the gills. Or sometimes it’ll just sit there, like just before the Division stop, for no obvious reason. —Vincent Santiago, via Threads

Re: “New but old again,” written by Mary Randolph and published in our October 3 issue (volume 54, number one)

So sad. Taking away all the charm of the neighborhood. —Angee Lewandowski, via Facebook

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

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

THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT FOR PRESIDENT

Last week, the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post killed their newspapers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president.

Something like 99 percent of the independent free weekly newspapers in our peer group endorsed Kamala Harris.

The Reader has never endorsed a candidate for president. It’s not our thing, and now that we’re a legal nonproﬁt it can’t be our thing as we are prohibited from doing so.

That said, we fully endorse the supersized Polish French bread pizza served from a food truck parked in the lot on Irving Park Road at the entrance to Schiller Woods East forest preserve. And we encourage you to check out all the other small businesses, local organizations, and neighborhood fun that our writers capture in these pages.

And for the love of the Reader, get out and vote. That’s the whole damn point of this place, isn’t it? v

—Solomon Lieberman, CEO and Publisher m slieberman@chicagoreader.com

Three

Voting November 6, 1962 WARREN

THEGREENPAGES

FOOD & DRINK

PHOTO ESSAY

Tapping into the infinite generosity of seeds

A recent Rogers Park Seed Library workshop taught Chicagoans how to save fruit, vegetable, ﬂower, and native plant seeds for use next season.

By MICHELLE KANAAR

One becomes hundreds becomes thousands. And on a recent weekday, as dusk settled and autumn fell in, a group gathered in search of them: seeds. Round, rust-colored rose mallow seeds, flu -ended butterfly weed seeds, and the biting edges of rattlesnake master seeds could all be found in the native plant garden in front of the Pottawatomie Park field house in Rogers Park. About 20 people huddled together to learn native plant seed-saving skills from pollinator biologist Imeña Valdes. Valdes, who wore a floral romper and honeycomb earrings, is the Project Wingspan Illinois agriculture and outreach state coordinator and a member of the Rogers Park Seed Library, the organization hosting the event.

The seed library is a volunteer group that has been working since 2019 to collect and distribute free fruit, vegetable, flower, and native plant seeds. “There are so many hurdles to growing food in Chicago,” said Olly Costello, one of the founding members, “like physical ability, financial cost, and access to space. There is also a high percentage of renters in Rogers Park. So it’s hard to have autonomy to make decisions about how we want to grow and consume our food and support and provide for each other.”

The library works to address those hurdles. Seeds come from all over: people’s gardens, partially used seed packs, garden stores, the Field Museum native plant garden, and even national mutual aid group the Cooperative Gardens Commission, which takes seeds that are too old to be sold from larger companies and redistributes them.

The bulk of the library inventory includes seeds for annual vegetables. In addition to that free resource, the library teaches seedsaving skills so that community members can learn how to save seeds from one harvest for the next.

On the next page is some of the knowledge Valdes imparted for saving native plant seeds, which can also be applied to other seeds.

Clockwise from top: Pollinator biologist Imeña Valdes checks to see if American bellﬂ ower seeds are ready for harvest; a label is created for seed collection and storage; Peter Normand cuts rose mallow seed heads into a brown paper bag. MICHELLE KANAAR

R ROGERS PARK SEED LIBRARY

PO Box Collective, 6900 N. Glenwood

Every second Sunday 2–3 PM, every third Tuesday 6–7: 30 PM poboxcollective.us

Seed-saving steps

Make sure the stem of the plant’s flower is brown. If it is not brown yet, but you are worried animals or insects will eat the seeds, you can place a mesh bag over the seed head until it is ready.

Cut the dried flower (seed head) at the base. Don’t include the stem or leaves, and double-check that there are no pests. Leave 80 percent of the seed heads as a resource for other animals and to germinate and create the next generation of plants.

& DRINK

Place seed heads in a brown paper bag. They can also be cut directly into the bag to avoid losing seeds.

Depending on the species, rub or tap the seeds out over a white paper plate. It’s easier to see the seeds on white, and the plate has a lip in case the seeds bounce; you can then fold the plate and funnel them into an envelope.

Store seeds in paper envelopes with the plant’s name and collection date. Store each type in a diﬀerent envelope. Typically, you’ll want to store them in a dark and dry place, but it depends on the species.

Plant the seeds. Native seeds need to experience winter temperatures to germinate in the spring. Otherwise, you will have to simulate winter for them by placing them in the refrigerator (this is called cold stratiﬁcation). A er a year, the germination rate of seeds goes down. Annual vegetables and herbs should be stored and planted in the spring. Find information about exact planting dates at extension.illinois.edu.

L: Rose mallow seed heads that are ready to be harvested R: Valdes taps mountain mint seed heads to get the seeds out. MICHELLE KANAAR FOR CHICAGO READER

FOOD & DRINK

continued from p. 7

Additionally, Valdes notes if you’re having trouble identifying which part is the seed, you can google the seed characteristics, such as color and size. Typically, viable seeds that are ready to be harvested are some shade of brown. Healthy seeds are usually plump— they’re full of nutrients to get them through germination.

Valdes explained that the reason you want to leave the stems is for small native bees who use them for habitat and winter hibernation. If you’re ready to cut the stems in the spring but are unsure if your friendly neighbors have emerged, cut the stem at the base and leave it outside so that the bees can emerge when they are ready.

“If you don’t protect the pollinators in the winter, you won’t have them to pollinate in the spring,” Valdes said. And that is a problem because bee pollination enables plant reproduction and adaptability. Without bees, we would have no food.

The stems and leaf litter also provide habitats for other pollinators, such as the luna moth and the swallowtail butterﬂy, who disguise their cocoons and chrysalides as dried leaves. The leaf litter also supplies food for millipedes who feed on decaying matter. “If you clean it up, you’ve just taken all their food,” said Valdes, “and that’s very rude.”

As the workshop wrapped up inside the ﬁeld house, participants began closing their envelopes and jars of seeds to bring home. Flyers for the Rogers Park Seed Library on the tables read, “As students of seeds, we give deep thanks for the lessons seeds o er us around

abundance, reciprocity, and generosity as we seek to embody these principles.”

The library has distributed hundreds of thousands of seeds. “Every season we worry if we have enough, but we always receive so many donations,” Costello said. The group seeks to move away from capitalistic frameworks around commodification and scarcity and be part of building a society based on belonging and collective contribution. “One seed becomes hundreds becomes thousands so easily,” Costello said. As they look to seeds as a teacher, Costello asks, “What would it look like for us to practice that same inﬁnite generosity?”

The Rogers Park Seed Library group meets monthly. To volunteer or hear about future events, email rpseedlibrary@ gmail.com or follow them on Instagram @rogersparkseedlibrary.

To order seeds from the library, ﬁll out their Google Form that goes live in late February. The best place to ﬁnd the form will be on their Instagram Linktree. It will also be posted on Facebook and shared with their Listserv. A $5 donation is suggested to help cover shipping, Seeds are usually shipped out in early March. Select Chicago Public Library branches also have seed libraries. You can see which at chipublib.org/news/seed-libraries-at-select-chicago-public-library-branches.

To learn how to set up your own seed library or see where there is a seed library near you, check out seedlibraries.weebly.com. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Idon’t draw many lines when it comes to sweets, but usually, the sweeter and more chocolatey, the better. It came as a surprise, then, when I ﬁ rst bit into Nata’s subtle guava Linzer cookie and found love at first bite. Love isn’t a word I’m tossing around lightly when describing the delicate signature cookie from motherdaughter duo Rocio Jimenez and Rosie Cruz. Love pervades each buttery layer of shortbread that melts into the smooth, light guava filling. Love is the attention that Jimenez and Cruz place into their recipes, locally sourcing as many fresh ingredients as possible while honoring the traditional flavors of Mexico. Love is the fine construction of each item on Nata’s menu— the cookie particularly, with its perfectly

trim edges and even coating of powdered sugar. Such consistency in a store-bought cookie is a clinical reminder of its mass production, but in the hands of Jimenez and Cruz, it demonstrates the passionate care of their baking.

Love is not just in the cookie itself: it is the spirit I sense when arriving at Plant Chicago’s Mercado de Intercambio in Back of the Yards on a breezy day, listening to the children play at Davis Square Park against the chatter of the regular vendors. My husband and I stop at Nata’s table for a compact box of cookies, thank them once again for making our beautiful wedding cake, and find a bench to savor the ﬁrst bite on a perfect Saturday afternoon. —DANIELLA MAZZIO NATA Pop-ups across the city, $2, 312-414-4906, natachicago.com v

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

Guava Linzer cookie at Nata

From L: Valdes demonstrates how to remove the plume from the seed on butterﬂy weed pods; a coneﬂower has dried; Rhonan Tenney-Allen and Megan Robertson look for seeds. MICHELLE KANAAR FOR CHICAGO READER

CHICAGO HAUNT BUILDERS

chicagohauntbuilders.com or facebook.com/groups/chicagohauntbuilders

The terror at home

Chicago Haunt Builders creates community for Halloween enthusiasts.

By CHARLI RENKEN

It’s a mildly chilly evening when my friend Chester Sikora decides to take me through his neighborhood in Roselle to look at Halloween displays. I’m not expecting much; they’re just people’s houses after all. It turns out I’m dead wrong.

We park in front of a house with a ticket booth up front. The booth, it turns out, is just for show. The experience we’re about to walk into is totally free. While being handed a playbill with “Hellhouse Theatre” printed across the front, I feel something brush against my leg. A nine-year-old child dressed as a cat scurries away from me, meowing and hissing. He comes back a few times just to scare me while I wait to enter the haunted house, and he does a good job. I jump every time.

What follows is a ten-minute walkthrough of what haunt builder Amanda Delaney calls, “The Revenge of Hansel and Gretel.” We’re ﬁrst taken into a theater with an ornate chandelier hanging from the ceiling, rows of extremely old-looking chairs, and a woman onstage. The woman reads a poem about Hansel and Gretel getting revenge on their parents for abandoning them in the woods and then sends us on our way through a back door. We’re then led to an oven where a witch terrorizes us and later locks us up in a cage. Thankfully there’s candy for our troubles.

I leave the little haunted house breathless and giddy. I turn to Sikora and ask, “Can we go to another one?”

The Delaney family’s Harvey’s Hellhouse is just one attraction on a list of 400+ haunted experiences across the Chicago area, including sites in the city, suburbs, and northwest Indiana. Chicago Haunt Builders (CHB) is a community of Halloween enthusiasts who create stunning bespoke Halloween displays in their front yards. Some, like Harvey’s Hellhouse, are walkthrough experiences with a range of interactive elements, but the majority are just for viewing. That doesn’t make them any less impressive.

While the community of builders has had a presence in the area since the early 2000s, it wasn’t until 2011 that CHB became what it is

today: a Facebook group and website where people can ask questions and schedule meetups for group builds of animatronics and other Halloween decorations. In 2011, there were 55 members. Now the group is over 3,200 strong.

“There’s no real leader of the group. Everyone just kind of shares their expertise. For example, [a woman named] Cheryl makes these incredible tombstones—so there’s our tombstone builder. Mike joined CHB when he was 16, and now he owns Hallucinations Creations, Inc. and builds pneumatic [animatronics]. So if there’s a question about that, he can answer them,” group founder Toby Wrolson explains.

Some builders spend all year preparing for their annual builds. The Delaney family starts planning just a week or two into November, and over the summer grandfather Robert starts building sets and props dictated to him by his wife Pamela and daughter Amanda. This is the family’s second year taking part in CHB.

“I’m really proud to be part of the Chicago Haunt Builders. They’ve been a very supportive group, a very fun group, and it’s been nice to be able to extend my love of Halloween throughout the entire year,” Amanda says. “These people live, eat, and breathe Halloween.”

While there are o cial CHB houses all over Chicagoland, Carol Stream is known for having some of the biggest displays.

“Welcome to rich bitch city!” Sikora cries as we zoom past the city limits sign and into the village. It’s true that while CHB houses are a lot of fun, they’re also a sign of wealth. Wrolson estimates he’s spent roughly $120,000 on animatronic parts for his Haunt 31 throughout its 26 years. Haunt builder Chrissy Moore says she spends about the equivalent of an extra summer’s month of electricity each October to run her annual display. Tim Slanker, another founding member of CHB and creator of one of the biggest displays in Carol Stream, says some of his animatronics cost upwards of $10,000. That wealth does go back into the community.

“Professional haunted houses are so expensive these days,” Chester tells me as we drive

to another house. “You could either spend like $40 or $50 to walk through something that takes you ten minutes after spending two hours waiting in line, or you could pull up to someone’s house who put in a lot of time and dedication for free. I’ve been to [Halloween displays] where someone built a tiny walkthrough haunted house in their garage and it’s so much better.”

The majority of experiences on the CHB list (found on their website or through their app) are free. Some ask for donations to local charities or food bank items, but it’s rare to actually have to pay to visit. That a ordability makes it an accessible Halloween activity, especially for families who would otherwise have to pay upwards of $200 for two adults and two kids to attend Six Flags’s Fright Fest, for instance.

Sikora has been going to CHB houses for

years. He tells me he’s been to some houses like Harvey’s Hellhouse multiple times.

“I just love the whimsy of it. People are willing to put in a lot of time and e ort and money to make something really unique and special for the community, and the majority of them do it all for free. That’s just really cool,” he says.

Those looking for a unique and low-cost Halloween experience should check the CHB website for a list of participating houses. Each listing has a description of the house, whether it’s a display or walk-through, if donations are being accepted, and other information. You might also want to swing by Carol Stream in late November and December, as many builders also put on massive Christmas displays. v

m crenken@chicagoreader.com

Suburban haunted yards, including the Harvey’s Hellhouse “ticket booth” at lower le CHARLI RENKEN

Kinky canvassing

From leather daddies to drag nuns, Chicago’s kinksters remind us that to exist is political.

By ADAM RHODES

On an otherwise quiet early-October Sunday morning, a troupe of leather daddies and drag activists shout from a fabulous vortex of glitter, eyelashes, leather, and lace that swirl outside the Leather Archives & Museum (LA&M): “Are you registered to vote?”

Amid cheers, whoops, and honking car horns, a kinky contingent of more than a dozen pups, daddies, nuns, and subs occupy the intersection at Devon and Greenview, waving to cars and chatting up pedestrians in hopes of registering voters ahead of the looming voteby-mail deadline. (While the vote-by-mail deadline has passed, Illinoisans can still register to vote in person on Election Day with two forms of identiﬁcation, at least one of which shows a current address).

The drive was the latest in a series organized by Vince Jay—the reigning Mr. Chicago Leather as of January—and was held in partnership with Chicago’s recently relaunched chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an international order of activist drag nuns whose ministry dates back to the late 1970s. Sisters Kenya Nott, Phyllis Cawk, Shiny Brite, and Peg M. Hardt of Chicago’s order were there to drum up support for the event.

Jay estimates he’s talked to roughly 100 people at similar events throughout the city, including at the popular Market Days street festival. He also became a deputy registrar with the state of Illinois, allowing him to register voters as part of his e orts to promote civic engagement among queer people and the public at-large.

Under the shadow of yet another consequential election, Jay and his leatherfolkin-arms hope voters realize how important this election is, even in a Democratic stronghold like Illinois.

“I’m concerned about people being apathetic or being like, ‘Well, we live in a blue state, so it doesn’t really matter, right?’” Jay says. “It still matters, and what we do here can also be seen elsewhere. So even though we may, supposedly, have the blue wave happening here, I think it’s still important to think about the other swing states.”

But this wasn’t your (leather) daddy’s typical Democrat-or-bust registration drive. Jay, and volunteers like Chicago’s reigning Leather Ambassador, Daddy Danger Wolf, also urged voters to keep a keen eye on local issues and institutions like judges and the school board, which have come to the fore as important venues of civil rights issues, like the ability to discuss LGBTQ+ topics in schools.

“We can think of ourselves as deeply safe here, but there have been attacks everywhere,” Wolf says, amid a cacophony of car horns and fan thwoorps.

Jay said his work is particularly motivated by the fetish and other sex-positive communities’ ﬁrsthand experience of being cast o by a powerful majority. In an e ort to uplift Jay’s work, 2024’s International Mr. and Ms. Leather both lent their energy to the October 6 event, traveling from San Francisco and Austin, Texas, respectively, to rally voters outside LA&M.

“We’re one of the ﬁrst people they attack, one of the ﬁrst people they bring up when they want to galvanize Republicans,” says current

“We are all one big family, and we have to protect each other. When there’s that division, it creates weakness.”

Sex-positive and kinky people, and the meeting spaces they occupy, have long been centers of belonging, activism, and sexual exploration. A 2010 article from World of Wonder, the production company behind the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise, recounts a registration drive organized by the League of Women Voters and the now-shuttered New St. Marks Baths, a gay bathhouse in Manhattan, ahead of the 1980 presidential election. During the HIV/AIDS crisis, kinksters were on the front lines of not only the virus itself but also the activism demanding government attention and respect for those dying from it.

International Mr. Leather, Alpha Pup Savage. “They go attack our trans community, our fetish community, talking about how we’re deviant and all this kind of stu . So we do need to have a voice and ensure that there’s a lot of political power here.”

While a voter registration drive led by leather-clad bruisers might sound like a sexy-but-confusing Venn diagram of priorities, students of queer history know that the fetish community has long been a hub of political activity.

Chicago’s very own bathhouse Man’s Country, run by leather legend Chuck Renslow, passed out safe-sex pamphlets and condoms after the HIV virus had been identiﬁed and offered STI testing at a clinic upstairs. Renslow also founded the LA&M, launched the International Mr. Leather contest, and helped solidify Chicago’s kink scene from the 1970s to the ’90s. Some historians credit the growth and relative political safety of Chicago’s leather scene to Renslow’s careful politicking with powerful leaders in the city.

Savage says ACT UP “set the example. They set the precedent for us in the future to say, ‘We need to get out there. We need to vote. We need to make change because it’s not going to change for the better for us if we just sit down on our couches.’”

Kinksters, sluts, and queers alike know that to exist as we are is political. Our sexual liberation is tied to robust access to health care, body autonomy, and reproductive freedom. And though the target du jour for Republicans may be trans people, International Ms. Leather Goddess Indigo and other leatherfolk at the registration drive echo the need for solidarity among the communities conservatives aim to divide.

“We think there’s the leathermen, there’s the trans community,” Indigo says. “No. We are all one big family, and we have to protect each other. When there’s that division, it creates weakness.” v

m

letters@chicagoreader.com

Sisters Kenya Nott (le ) and Shiny Brite rally voters at LA&M on October 6, 2024. ADAM RHODES

International Ms. Leather Goddess Indigo ADAM RHODES

summer surgery

heartbreak is a thousand needles stretching through vocal chords & arteries. my God held a gun to my head & served me a year’s worth of heartache on the ﬁnest china dollar store had to oﬀer. i chewed & swallowed in chunks, each bite stale on my teeth.

cried so much, i coughed up my spinal chord. pretended to be surprised when she took it to skip rope over my shattered remains.

lye into earth, lick your wounds raw.

i spiraled down staircases of my own making with blind eyes & a chip on my shoulder. watched familial fragment sink to earth’s core. now we mourn for endless nights at our altars.

under a heavy moon, lake michigan takes me into her waves & makes me whole again. fresh water in my oversized pores. i’ll be okay if i believe hard enough. seduced by hydrangea scented whispers & was left gasping & helpless. there is a song in my calloused palms that only a mother could know. i am spinning, i am frozen. i am full of adornment & venom in a humid breeze, under stiletto ﬁngernails, streaked in smudged mascara.

but eventually one will decide to stop drowning in the bubbles of an existential abyss & embrace. there is no pain sweeter than this. the greatest gift is the beginning of the end.

By Angel Page Smigielski

Find a Reader!

Angel Page Smigielski (They/Them) is an actor, writer and stage manager based on the west side of Chicago, IL. They graduated from Columbia College Chicago, where they studied Theatre, poetry and ASL (American Sign Language). Angel believes in making intentional, impactful work with artists who believe in that as well. This poem has an accompanying short ﬁlm posted on Angel’s instagram @chicagloangel

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

Fall Hours

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

Zip! Staged Reading

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

NEWS & POLITICS

ELECTIONS

Do we really need to vote for school board candidates?

The answer is yes, and the reasons are many.

By MAUREEN KELLEHER

On October 24, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s second handpicked group of seven local leaders were sworn in as members of the Chicago Board of Education. They succeeded the mayor’s previous board, all of whom suddenly announced their resignations on October 4, after months of disagreement among the board, the mayor, and Pedro Martinez, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

In January, the board will change again, expanding to 21 people. We won’t know until sometime after Election Day how many of the newly appointed board members could continue to serve, because elected and appointed members must live in di erent parts of their districts. Mayor Johnson must announce his appointees by December 16. Though Johnson has tried to portray the board turnover as part of the larger transition, the leadership shake-up has stunned observers, including many parents.

“From what I’m hearing, nobody’s interested in trying to vote,” said Blaire Flowers, a mother of ﬁve in Austin and a parent leader with the advocacy group Kids First Chicago. Her district has only one candidate listed on the ballot, which could be even more discouraging. Flowers also pointed out perhaps the biggest challenge of all: “People who don’t have anything to do with media, they don’t know they get a say in the Board of Education.”

“It takes a lot of muscle not to be discouraged,” said Natasha Erskine, executive director of Raise Your Hand, a parent advocacy group that has long been involved in pushing Chicago’s move from an appointed to an elected school board. “We have to refuse to be discouraged and persist.” This week, Raise Your Hand volunteers will be present at schools on the south and west sides during arrival and dismissal to make sure parents know they can

vote for a school board member.

Despite all the confusion, a few things

The state of the school district

The new board will have plenty to do. CPS has long struggled to manage its ﬁnances and support all its students to achieve at high levels. During the pandemic, the federal government provided all public schools with unheard-of amounts of relief funding. Chicago’s share came to $2.8 billion. Much of that money went to pay for staffing, and CEO Pedro Martinez argues this choice made possible the relatively

The elected and appointed members will have to find common ground to get things done.

and the school district concerns who is responsible for paying for the pensions of nonteaching sta who belong to the city’s pension fund. For many years, the city paid for those pensions, but in 2020, Mayor Lori Lightfoot began shifting the cost to CPS. At the time, Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) criticized the shift, but now Johnson wants the district, not the city, to make the payment, which comes to $175 million this ﬁscal year.

In July, a political ﬁrestorm broke out over

remain certain. Each Chicago voter can vote for one school board member by November 5, sending a total of ten elected members to the board in January. The mayor will appoint an additional ten members, plus the chair, giving him a majority of support. But some major decisions will likely require more than a simple majority of votes to pass. This means the elected and appointed members will have to ﬁnd common ground to get things done.

strong academic recovery Chicago students have experienced since the pandemic. But the money is running out, and there’s no clear path to keep paying for those jobs. Nor is there an obvious way to pay for raises for teachers and principals. Both groups are now in contract negotiations, and the teacher contract negotiations in particular have dragged on and sparked tensions.

Another sticking point between the city

these issues. Mayor Johnson proposed taking out a high-interest, short-term loan of $300 million to cover operating costs, including this year’s pension payment for nonteaching sta . The CTU supported the idea. But Martinez— and, surprisingly, the mayor’s own school board—said no.

At the same time, CTU began ramping up its criticisms of Martinez, culminating in a September no-conﬁdence vote. Later that month,

A hallway of Jesse Sherwood Elementary School on West 57th Street

RJohnson asked for Martinez’s resignation, but Martinez refused. Under pressure to fire Martinez, all seven school board members announced their resignations in early October. Will the mayor’s new board use their short time in o ce to approve the loan and fire Martinez? Many observers expect they will, but Martinez’s contract doesn’t make firing him easy. And the outcry against the loan has shifted the conversation to pulling money from Chicago’s many tax increment financing (TIF) districts, which divert property tax money away from schools into development funds controlled by the mayor and City Council. Even if the mayor declares a huge TIF surplus (which seems likely), it’s also likely that won’t be enough to fill the budget hole.

income tax to pay for schools. Governor J.B. Pritzker has repeatedly said the state will not step in to solve Chicago’s current problems.

The state of the races

While the political drama plays out among the mayor, the school district’s CEO, and the teachers union, the first-ever elections for school board have generated their own set of tensions. A mailer funded by the CTU accused politically centrist, charter-friendly school board candidates of supporting the far-right Project 2025 policy agenda conservatives hope former president Donald Trump will adopt if he wins a second term.

By late October, the candidates had raised

donation from Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings.

“What’s going to be really important is that you don’t have one entity dominate this election. You’re going to need a balance,” observed Maggie Cullerton Hooper, one of four candidates in District 2, which covers the north lakefront and extends into West Ridge, North Park, and Albany Park. She has not been endorsed by CTU or by its notable opponents.

Sendhil Revuluri served as the Board of Education’s vice president under former mayor

Since 2018, when advocates ﬁnally persuaded state lawmakers to revamp how Illinois distributes money to schools, the state has slowly been increasing its contribution to historically underfunded districts, including Chicago. Although CTU and others argue the pace of that increase is too slow, in 2020 voters defeated the “fair tax” referendum that would have created a graduated

“It takes a lot of muscle not to be discouraged.”

a total of nearly $5 million, blowing campaign spending caps o all but two of the races. Much of that money comes from three anti-CTU political groups: Chicago Democrats for Education, Urban Center PAC (cofounded by former schools CEO Paul Vallas and former charter network operator Juan Rangel), and the Illinois Network of Charter Schools’ super PAC, which received a $100,000

governing: listening deeply to the community, setting a vision with clear goals, and holding the CEO and sta accountable to achieve it.

Lightfoot from 2019 until 2022. “I choose to believe the board could be e ective regardless of which camp they come from. It depends on what they actually do,” he said.

As a 2024 fellow with the Academy for Local Leadership, a nonproﬁt e ort to prepare people to run winning school board campaigns and govern wisely, Revuluri created a candidate questionnaire focused on governance that drew responses from 18 candidates in six races. He hopes to be involved in training new board members to understand their role in

Despite her frustrations, Flowers, the parent in Austin, remains hopeful that the elected board can eventually force positive change.

“I’m hoping for a board that will listen to parents and actually make the policy changes we have been needing for a very long time.” And she already knows what she’ll tell lawmakers about how to improve the next election cycle: “They have to cap the spending limits and give parents a real chance to run.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Le : CEO Pedro Martinez visits a classroom. Right: a student at Spencer Technology Academy COURTESY CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Chicago Board of Education meeting on October 24 MAUREEN KELLEHER

NEWS & POLITICS

Poll workers, explained

From election judges to poll watchers, here’s what you need to know about the people working your polling place.

By LAYLA BROWN-CLARK

Early voting is underway in all 50 of the city’s wards. When you head to the polls, you’ll see a number of paid workers and volunteers doing everything from checking in voters to watching people tabulate their ballots.

What is a poll worker?

Poll workers serve as the face of the election office during voting. Having enough workers is essential to providing a smooth voting experience. Possible tasks include setting up and preparing polling locations, welcoming voters to the facility, verifying voter registration information, and distributing ballots. Poll workers are there to ensure voters understand all the aspects of the voting process, from working the machines to recording your vote.

ballots, answer questions about voter registration, tally votes, close the polls at 7 PM, and certify the results. Judges are paid between

voting officials have similar responsibilities to election coordinators, but instead, these individuals work all voting periods.

Based on your ward, poll workers might still be needed in your area. The application process to serve as an election judge is still available to the public for the 2024 presidential election at pollworker.chicagoelections.gov.

What are the requirements?

For all poll worker positions, you must be a U.S. citizen and a Cook County resident (or

All poll workers must also complete training; people who previously worked as poll workers must renew the training for their position every two years.

Poll workers are required to be able to speak, read, and write in English.

Election coordinators must be registered voters (this position isn’t open to high schoolers) and have experience operating and maintaining a wide range of computer technologies. Ward committee people, precinct captains, candidates for public o ce, and anyone who works for or shares a household with them cannot work as election coordinators. People with sex o ense convictions are also barred from the post under state law.

What types of poll workers are there?

Chicago residents can apply to become an election judge, election day coordinator, or early voting o cial.

Election judges manage the polling place and assist voters. Judges must arrive at 5 AM on Election Day to help set up equipment, open the polls promptly at 6 AM, hand out

$170 and $230.

Election coordinators oversee precinct setup, operation, and breakdown and help election judges manage polling places. Coordinators assist voters, manage the equipment from 5 AM, help judges close polling places, and deliver the results from the precinct to a nearby receiving station. Each coordinator is assigned to one polling place in the City of Chicago and earns $450. Early

college students must attend a Cook County school) who is at least 16 years old. If an election judge is 18 years or older, they must also be a registered voter in Cook County.

Juniors and seniors in high school can serve as election judges with written permission from a parent or legal guardian and a school principal. Eligible students must be U.S. citizens who live in Cook County and have at least a 3.0 GPA.

What’s the diﬀerence between poll workers and poll watchers?

Unlike poll workers, poll watchers are partisan positions. Poll watchers are volunteers who represent a candidate, political party, civic organization, or ballot proposition and observe the conduct of the election. They may hear and see instructions given to voters, compare signatures in the poll book with those on ballot applications, challenge votes cast by people they believe aren’t qualiﬁed to vote at their precinct, observe voters depositing their ballots into the scanner, and obtain poll tapes of the results after the results are transmitted. Poll tapes contain vote tallies for every candidate and ballot initiative.

In primary elections, each precinct allows two poll watchers per candidate and one per political party or civic organization. In the general election, political parties are allowed an additional poll watcher per precinct. v m lbrownclark@chicagoreader.com

ON CULTURE

Trumped up

How did we get here again?

By DEANNA ISAACS

Earlier this month, the University of Chicago announced that it had a groundbreaking, AI-enabled new study that analyzed presidential speech and quantiﬁed something that’s been widely observed: the distinctiveness of Trump talk.

The U. Chicago researchers compared Donald Trump’s speeches to those of other presidents and presidential candidates. They found that he is not only the champion of short sentences and repetition, but his “use of divisive and antagonistic language and his tendency to target political opponents distinguish him from all other presidential candidates.”

Or, as he might be inclined to add: “All those others. Those corrupt others. They’re corrupt. They’re so corrupt. And stupid.” (Thanks to this study, in which large language models trained, for example, on 83,000 campaign speech sentences, we also now have the data to prove that Trump uses words like “stupid” and “corrupt” a lot.)

Meanwhile, for those of us who have naively wondered how dictators come to power and now worry that we’re seeing the answer play out in our own democracy, there’s the work of Stephen Reicher, a psychology professor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Reicher is a coauthor of a book, The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Inﬂuence and Power, which laid out a theory of “identity leadership” when it was originally published in 2006.

Reicher and his coauthors, Alexander Haslam and Michael J. Platow, said that in contrast to older top-down models of political leadership (think monarchs), modern leaders and followers must share a group identity. These e ective leaders are “entrepreneurs of identity.” They deﬁne the group they seek to lead and then present themselves as both one of that group and the only person who can solve its problems. If there’s an outside enemy to be blamed for those problems, all the better. In an opinion piece published in the Guardian in July (“Donald Trump is a misogynistic, billionaire felon. Here’s why Americans can’t

stop voting for him”), Reicher wrote that “Leaders always represent a specific social group. . . . The more they are loved by insiders, the more such adulation seems bizarre and inexplicable to outsiders.”

In Trump’s case, the “group” is the American people and the enemy is “the establishment,” very fluidly defined to include Democratic politicians, immigrants, “elites,” the media, anyone else who opposes him, and a grab bag of foreign countries, while he—posing as a “regular guy” who worked hard and succeeded at the American dream—is the “savior” who will ﬁx everything. It’s messianic, with all the fervor that elicits.

“If you define yourself in contrast to the political establishment,” Reicher writes, “the breaking of the rules of politics [and, apparently, any other rules] a rms your identity . . .

Trump thrives because of, not despite, his violations.”

Which left me wondering whether Trump, the pitchman—hawker of meat and Bibles— was acting knowingly in this piece of political theater or was merely its perfect tool. Could this all be intentional on Trump’s part? I asked Reicher via email.

“There are politicians who understand transgressive politics,” he wrote back.

“Whether Trump is one of those, I don’t know.”

Reicher prefaced the rest of his response with this: “I don’t think Trump is Hitler or [Steve] Bannon [is] Goebbels. But there is this in common. Goebbels was once asked what his greatest propaganda achievement was. He replied ‘Hitler.’ Whatever Hitler was like as an individual, Goebbels played a huge part in determining what people saw and knew of him. He created the ‘Hitler myth.’”

“So similarly,” he continued, “whatever Trump does or does not understand himself, people around him understand full well. Bannon in particular was well-read in the work of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist, who wrote extensively about ‘enemyship’—the process of gaining inﬂuence over the in-group by creating a

demonic out-group that threatens ‘us’ and is ignored or abetted by one’s rivals. In this way one can pose as champion of the people [while depicting] one’s political rivals as enemies of the people. A technique which is central to Trump’s repertoire.”

On Sunday night, at Madison Square Garden, after other speakers insulted everyone from Harris to the entire island of Puerto Rico, Trump rallied thousands of his supporters.

“Nine days from now it’s hardworking patriots like you who are going to save our country,” he said. “After all we have been through together . . . we will never ever, ever, ever surrender. . . . Together we will make America powerful again. . . . We will make America safe again. . . . And we will make America great again.” v

m disaacs@chicagoreader.com

“Trump thrives because of, not despite, his violations.” PHOTO

ARTS & CULTURE

REVIEW

Becoming Paula ModersohnBecker

An Art Institute retrospective captures the vitality of this pioneering painter.

By KERRY REID

RP”PAULA MODERSOHNBECKER: I AM ME”

Through 1/ 12/25 : Mon 11 AM– 5 PM, Thu 11 AM– 8 PM, Fri–Sun 11 AM– 5 PM; Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, artic.edu/ exhibitions/9592/paulamodersohn-becker-i-am-me, adults $ 32 ($ 40 Fast Pass, $27 Illinois residents, $20 Chicago residents), seniors 65 +, students, and teens 14 –17 $26 ($ 34 Fast Pass, $21 Illinois residents, $14 Chicago residents), children under 14 and Chicago teens 14 –17 free

aula Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day occupies a wall tucked into the middle of the Art Institute’s current exhibition “Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me.” Nude from the waist up, with a large amber necklace descending between her breasts and her hands wrapped protectively around a slightly protruding belly, the painting suggests that the subject is pregnant. But in fact when she painted it in May 1906, the German-born Modersohn-Becker was not pregnant. She was living in Paris—separated from her husband, fellow artist Otto Modersohn—and trying to decide if she could make it on her own as a serious painter instead of juggling a career with being a wife and mother. (Modersohn, a widower, had a young daughter from his ﬁrst marriage.) Tellingly, the painting is signed “PB,” excising her married name. The slight smile on her face seems to suggest a private joke: Is imagining a pregnancy a source of joy, or a way of telling the viewer, “This will not be?” She eventually did return to Germany and Otto. A year and a half after creating that portrait, on November 2, 1907, Modersohn-Becker gave birth to her daughter Mathilde. Eighteen days later, she was dead at age 31 from a postpartum pulmonary embolism, leaving behind a body of work that encompassed 700 paintings, roughly 1,400 drawings, and 11 prints—all made in only ten years.

a major retrospective in a U.S. museum until this current exhibition, curated by the Art Institute’s Jay A. Clarke (Rothman family curator of prints and drawings), and Jill Lloyd, an independent curator who serves on the board of trustees at New York’s Neue Galerie, which hosted the show earlier this year.

My ﬁrst introduction to Modersohn-Becker was through poetry, not painting. Her friend, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote the haunting long poem Requiem for a Friend after her death, which includes the heartbreaking line, “For somewhere, there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work”—an “enmity” seemingly embodied in Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day . In “I Am Me,” though, the “ancient enmity” feels less like a death match and more like a celebration of a young woman who was trying to weave together the contradictions of her too-short life. Modersohn-Becker’s work drew on both rural and cosmopolitan influence, while her personal life was dominated by periods of domestic bliss alongside the desire for an independent, creative life.

Though

her life was cut short, it’s impossible to see the work in “I Am Me” and not recognize both the tragedy of her story and the singular life force of her vision.

That painting is widely described as the ﬁrst nude self-portrait by a woman artist. Yet despite that historic distinction, as well as her inﬂuential role as a proto-expressionist, Modersohn-Becker’s work has never received

Modersohn-Becker was connected to the Worpswede colony near her hometown of Bremen.

The Worpswede artists, including Otto, were inspired by the plein air values of the French Barbizon and rejected what they saw as suffocating “academic” painting. They instead focused on capturing the landscapes and people around them. Modersohn-Becker’s work, particularly her studies of birch trees (several of which are displayed here) meshed with those inclinations, at least initially. Modersohn-Becker wrote of the birch trees around the Worpswede moors

as “chaste and naked,” and in her paintings, they stand slim and white against mottled backgrounds of green, rust, brown, and yellow, stretching out in landscapes both desolate and contemplative. Girl Blowing a Flute in the Birch Forest (1905), featuring crude figures of what look like children nestled against the trees with the large form of the girl and her flute dominating the foreground, looks like something from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Yet she also spent time in urban centers studying art, ﬁrst in Berlin and then Paris, where she became enamored of the work of Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. ModersohnBecker’s portraits in particular reflect the flatness of features and monumental forms of the latter. But her gaze, reﬂected in works like Reclining Mother and Child II and Kneeling Mother With Child at Her Breast (both from 1906), celebrates the loving, primal bond between women and children, rather than sexualizing the nude female form. To be reductive, it’s Gauguin minus the ick factor. Modersohn-Becker’s portraiture, which included old women and children near Worpswede as well as her friends and family (portraits of Otto, Rilke, and Rilke’s onetime wife, sculptor Clara Westho , are also in the show), isn’t sentimentalized. The masklike faces draw us in, tasking us with deciding what is happen-

ing behind those seemingly blank expressions.

Full disclosure: I wrote a play long ago about Modersohn-Becker, drawing on Rilke’s poem and the artist’s own journals and letters, which Otto published not long after her death. So seeing her work for the first time in person carries with it a personal emotional connection, along with the echoes of her writing and details of her biography, with which I have long been familiar. For those learning about her for the first time, “I Am Me” is a substantial and often breathtaking immersion that offers a solid range of work, including more than 50 paintings, 15 large-scale drawings, and five

Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Le Hand, 1907 COURTESY ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

ARTS & CULTURE

etchings. The subjects encompass still lifes (where the influence of Cézanne feels most apparent), landscapes, portraits, and selfportraits. (For a few of these, she drew on ancient Roman Egyptian portraits, or fayums, which she saw exhibited in 1903 at the Louvre.)

Her early drawings, near the beginning of the exhibition, capture the tensions between what Clarke describes in an essay for the show’s catalog as “beautiful and ugly, rich and poor.” She focused on older women and young girls for her subjects (presumably because they were less likely to need to work during the day). As Clarke notes of her drawing Female Nude Seated on a Chair (1898–99), Modersohn-Becker’s “generosity and empathy is evident in the model’s open yet fearful eyes.”

The exhibition doesn’t mention that her empathy in depicting the working people and families around Worpswede didn’t save the artist’s work from being classiﬁed as “degenerate” by the Nazis. Yet even before she died, Modersohn-Becker’s moves toward expressionism—or what she called “the singular essence of things” in a letter to Otto—earned her disdain, even from her husband.

The journals and letters of Otto (published in the 1983 edition of Paula ModersohnBecker: The Letters and Journals) show a husband ping-ponging between pride at his wife’s burgeoning talent (“My Paula is such a fine wench. An artist through and through. Her sense of color—no one else here has anything like it,” he wrote in 1902) and despair that “she will not accept any advice—it is very foolish and a pity . . . she paints life-size nudes, which she can’t do.” (The latter was written in late 1905, as Modersohn-Becker’s desire to devote herself to her work in Paris over domestic life in Germany grew.)

“A pity” is reportedly the last thing Modersohn-Becker said before she died. Most of her work has lived on in the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen—the ﬁrst museum in the world dedicated solely to a woman artist. The exhibition’s title comes from one of her letters to Rilke during her separation from Otto: “And now I don’t know how to sign my name. I am not Modersohn and I am not Paula Becker anymore, I am Me, and hope to become that more and more.” Though her life was cut short, it’s impossible to see the work in “I Am Me” and not recognize both the tragedy of her story and the singular life force of her vision. v m kreid@chicagoreader.com

BOOKS

Complicating the Rust Belt

A new Belt anthology is a welcome antidote to the mainstream media’s parachute reporting.

By KERRY CARDOZA

The Rust Belt, the postindustrial midwest, flyover country. Are these terms—which describe the area roughly from Wisconsin to Bu alo, New York—useful anymore? Were they ever? Every four years, the mainstream media parachutes into Small Town, USA to paint in broad, generic strokes what “real America” is like, imbuing the area with the power to sway presidential elections though not important enough to pay much attention to otherwise. Since 2013, Belt Publishing has done the opposite—it has invested in writers and writing that go deep into the heart of middle America. Their titles cover everything from a West Virginia teachers’ strike to a history of Arab Americans in Indianapolis to a deep dive into Chicago’s house music scene. At the imprint’s core is its series of city-focused anthologies. Edited by Anne Trubek, Belt’s founder, Best of the Rust Belt brings together highlights primarily from this series, o ering readers a selection of smart essays under the themes of growing up, changing times, and hubs and homes.

Some of the most compelling writing in the book, which features nearly three dozen essays, centers on Chicago. Megan Stielstra’s personal essay tracks her career in tandem with the changes of the South Loop, from 1995, when she was a college student, to 2015, when she was newly laid off from a college administrative job. Britt Julious waxes poetic about spending time at her grandparents’ home in Austin and feeling safely enveloped in the community there. Gint Aras o ers a fascinating insider look at Marquette Park, which was an insular, majority Lithuanian neighborhood in the 60s and 70s; after years of white flight—and many well-documented racist instances, including KKK rallies—the area now has predominantly Latine and Black residents. And Audrey Petty’s vignette on moving to South Shore and the childlike wonder it evokes to live in such close proximity to

Lake Michigan—along with the closeness and richness of the neighborhood—is a triumph. There is much to appreciate elsewhere in the book. Joseph S. Pete, a reporter with the Times of Northwest Indiana, o ers a clear-eyed assessment of what it’s like to be an employee at Gary Works, once the world’s largest steel mill. Researcher and historian Michael R. Allen’s look at the history of midwestern public housing towers, and their doomed fates due to lack of adequate government funding and resources, is sobering. He calls out both Republicans and Democrats for their abandonment of public housing as a priority. A photo essay by artist and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient LaToya Ruby Frazier on her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, an industrial suburb of Pittsburgh, is vital. Frazier’s black-and-white

images—from her ﬁrst body of work, the well-known “The Notion of Family”—of the economic decline of Braddock and its impact on her family evince the sharp eye and care for the community that have become her hallmarks.

But it is Saint Louis–based author Sarah Kendzior’s “The Other ‘Forgotten People’: Feeling Blue in Missouri” that feels particularly prescient in this election year. It’s 2016, and Kendzior, a journalist and academic whose work focuses largely on “the authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union” and who has written extensively about politics and technology, finds herself at a conference in Palo Alto on the future of news. Trump has just been elected, but she finds that tech elites and coastal publishers are choosing to remain ignorant about the middle of the country. They’re incredulous that the midwest isn’t composed solely of disaffected, white, male Trump voters—and that there are reporters in the region who could deftly cover their own communities. So the coastal mainstream media remains largely unaware of the complex realities of the Rust Belt, its blue cities, and—as Kendzior notes—how Saint Louis was the first city to shut down a Trump rally. And that’s doubly detrimental because as local media is slowly decimated, more and more Americans rely on these national outlets for information.

“It is a terrible thing to be in pain and ignored—as a place, as an individual. It is perhaps worse to ﬁnally be recognized, but only as a symbol—to be given a mask and told that it’s your face,” Kendzior writes. Let her words, and the words of all the writers featured in Best of the Rust Belt, be a lesson to us, whatever the outcome of this election may be. The middle of the country is not a monolith. It’s diverse, complicated, and ever-changing; it’s full of stories if you care to listen. v

kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

COURTESY BELT

THEATER

OPENING

RTangled fairy tale

Kokandy’s Into the Woods captures the musical’s thorny dilemmas.

I’m admittedly biased as a pianist, but as soon as I saw two grand pianos center stage in the Chopin Studio Theatre, I immediately felt that Into the Woods was in good hands with Kokandy Productions. But then, I was never in much doubt. Kokandy’s 2022 production of Sweeney Todd was a triumph, and I was excited to see what the same director and choreographer, Derek Van Barham, would do with another Stephen Sondheim musical.

Happily, I can now report that Barham and company have done it again: this production beautifully captures the magic of Sondheim and James Lapine’s tangled fairy tale and the thorny moral dilemmas of a community in peril. It’s a mighty ensemble eﬀort, with more doubling of roles than usual, seamless scene changes, and a level of detail that made me wish I could take in more than one viewing. Even before the show begins, as actors mill about the stage and chat with each other, the whole experience feels like neighbors coming together to tell, or retell, a cherished story.

What’s more, the music is literally front and center, as it should be with Sondheim. Ariana Miles, Evelyn Ryan, and music director Nick Sula have orchestrated a two-piano version of the score, performed onstage by

Miles and Ryan with dexterity and poise. The pianists even become part of the story as characters interact with them throughout the show.

In a moment of national anxiety, I can’t think of a better blend of escapism and meaningful reﬂection than this dark fairy tale. Does everything work out ﬁne in the end? “Not always,” says the Baker (Kevin Webb). But take heart: no one is alone. —EMILY MCCLANATHAN INTO THE WOODS Through 12/22: Thu–Sat 7 PM, Sun 5 PM; also Wed 11/27 7 PM and Mon 12/9 7 PM; no show Thu 11/28; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, kokandyproductions.com, $45 general admission, $55 reserved seating, $35 students/seniors. Limited number of $15 artist tickets available each performance.

RRhinoceros rampages with relevance

Ionesco’s absurdist classic gets a scrappy revival at Theatre Y.

Is it possible for a 65-year-old play to be too soon?

Eugène Ionesco’s timeless satire about battling against herd hysteria gets a scrappy, spirited revival at Theatre Y thanks to a heterogenous cast and surprisingly eﬀective dumpster-chic set design, courtesy of local Renaissance man Marvin Tate, director Melissa Lorraine, and the Theatre Y youth apprentices.

When a rhinoceros is spotted running past the town square, it’s seen as an anomaly; as the sightings multiply, it’s taken as an emergency; when the pachyderms

outnumber the human citizenry, it becomes acceptable as the normal course of things. Ionesco has found such a multivalent symbol for groupthink that it’s easy to plug in COVID-19, Trump, AI, and any number of other current threats to the average person’s sanity and believe that the play is a timely if absurdist spin on just this very moment.

The dysphoric atmosphere is greatly enhanced by Lorraine’s decision to make the audience turn their chairs three times during the performance. By the end, up is down, back is front, and any notion of normalcy is out the window.

then some. Tiﬀany Williams sizzles as Ruby, the sultry newcomer, nearly drowning in the unpredictable waters of her own allure. And Jarvell Williams and Brian Bradford delight as Canewell and Red Carter, respectively, two musicians who can’t decide whether to follow the beat of their own drum—or Schoolboy’s.

Scenic designer Milo Blue sets an elegant, sparse stage with a service banner hanging in the window, perhaps dually holding space for those gone to both military and culture wars. The show’s pacing could beneﬁt from more patience in spots to allow the audience to savor the poetry, but overall it sings brightly like a freshly strung guitar.

Just before the inevitably bleak conclusion, Bérenger (Bide Akande)—the stand-in for the one remaining sane man in the lunatic asylum—pulls open the sliding metal back gate of the theater, runs out into the alley shirtless, and lets out a primal wail. It’s the kind of catharsis many of us are longing for now. The question is whether anyone in power is listening, no matter the decibel level. Noise-canceling tech has advanced enough that virtually anything can now be tuned out.

—DMITRY SAMAROV RHINOCEROS

Through 11/24: Sat 3 and 7 PM, Sun 3 PM; Theatre Y, 3611 W. Cermak, theatre-y.com, pay what you can

RDreaming in blues

City Lit’s Seven Guitars sings of redemption.

In Seven Guitars —the seventh play written in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, as well as one of his most lyrical and profound—the lack of an explicit reference to the title can lead to a surprisingly fruitful numerology quest. Yet a mention of the Lord’s Prayer (accompanied by Mahalia Jackson’s haunting vocals) nods toward its seven petitions of protection from God, outlining the scaffolding of faith that holds the play upright.

Set in 1948, Black neighbors in a boarding house are all caught in a cage of assured doom, built by racism, poverty, no-good men, violence, death, broken dreams, and sickness. Yet through joyful obstinance, they cling fast to one another, bound by an unseen shimmering spiderweb of music, religion, community, laughter, roots, food, love, healing, bid whist, and mutual witness. The bond achingly resonates like the blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and rock—all quintessential American music genres pioneered by the Black community—that deliciously season the play. Neighbors sustain neighbors, striving for, finding, and granting the redemption to each other that no one else will offer.

The central narrative follows Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton (a charming Jordan Gleaves), a talented musician with a hit song yet no money to show for it, and the perfect girlfriend Vera (a heartbreakingly vulnerable Maureen Azzun), whom he foolishly cheated on and tries to win back in a grand gesture of asking her to move to Chicago with him. As a matter of fact, Schoolboy desperately invites nearly everyone to Chicago with him—and their reticence underscores a hard-earned wisdom that the bright-eyed Schoolboy hasn’t yet gained.

The entire cast is stellar, working harmoniously to buoy the dazzling riﬀs of Wilson’s text. Robert Howard powerfully portrays Hedley, a man who swings wildly between unshakable faith and implosive distrust. Andrea Conway-Diaz brings riotous comic relief as Louise, the neighborhood matriarch who has seen it all—and

Thoughtfully directed at City Lit by Manny Buckley, Seven Guitars is a poignant testament to the power of dreaming your way out of an intractable reality; the only way to truly achieve balance when an immovable thumb weighs heavy on the scales. —SHERI FLANDERS SEVEN GUITARS Through 12/1: Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 11/18 and 11/25 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $35, $30 seniors, $12 students/military

RA wave of insights and emotions

Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood examines the a ermath of Ferguson.

Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s new production of Until the Flood opens on a makeshi shrine—candles, photos, stuﬀed animals—to Michael Brown, the Ferguson, Missouri, teenager whose shooting by a police oﬃcer inspired the 2014 social uprising at the heart of Dael Orlandersmith’s 2016 script. Orlandersmith originally performed this piece (seen at the Goodman in 2018) as a solo. Here, the voices of Ferguson are brilliantly realized by actors Jazzma Pryor and Jasmine “Jaz” Robertson and director Tim Rhoze.

Pryor and Robertson share eight roles between them, oﬀering what’s ultimately a broad survey of the people of Ferguson, each confronting in monologue the complex emotions that each person encountered in the wake of Brown’s killing.

Orlandersmith’s characters are a varied lot—Pryor and Robertson portray men and women, young and old, Black and white. Their nine monologues (one character speaks twice) integrally play off one another. In one segment, Robertson portrays Rusty Harden, a white retired police officer professing befuddlement at how Black residents would be confrontational toward the police: “It’s like they want to die.” In the next segment, Pryor gives voice to a 17-year-old boy, Hassan, who subsequently explains one root of his community’s anger—the seeming appetite by the police, whom he refers to as “hungry dogs,” for inflicting violence against young Black men.

Until the Flood is an apt name for a show featuring these characters, all searching for a smooth way to ﬂow (a word repeated frequently) through lives that have been intertwined with inexorable grief, violence, and racism, not to mention diﬃcult expectations set by communities and families. Paul, a teenager portrayed by Robertson, says: “I just keep going. I just keep minding my business.”

Rhoze’s direction oﬀers a brisk yet thoughtful staging of Orlandersmith’s profound script. Fleetwood-Jourdain’s work here should not be missed. —MATT SIMONETTE UNTIL THE FLOOD Through 11/10: Sat 7 PM, Sun 3 PM; Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston, fjtheatre.com, $30 v

BEGINS OCTOBER 31

PROPEL

2024-25 Season

Join the nation’s most diverse orchestra for a full season of bold symphonic music for just $60 with our Pay What You Can Subscription. Join us at Naperville’s Wentz Hall (WH) or in Chicago at Auditorium Theatre (AH).

Use code READER60 at checkout.

SCREEN & STAGE

CULTURE CHRONICLES

Season Opener

9/7 WH & 9/8 AT

Special Co-Commission 11/21 WH & 11/22 AT

HOLIDAYS OF JOY One Night Only 12/19 AT

BLACK BEING

MLK Tribute

1/19 WH & 1/20 AT

CHARLES IVES’ AMERICA

150th Anniversary 2/22 Mandel Hall

University of Chicago

LOVE LETTERS

Women’s History Month 3/13 WH & 3/16 AT

TONAL TRANSFORMATION

Season Finale

5/9 WH & 5/10 AT

Written by Duncan Macmillan

With Jonny Donahoe

Directed by Kimberly Senior

FILMFILMFILM

An interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum: ‘It’s a little bit like improvising.’

The longtime Reader ﬁlm critic discusses his life, career, and artistry amid the release of his new book.

By JOSHUA MINSOO KIM

Jonathan Rosenbaum didn’t plan on being a film critic. Born in Florence, Alabama, the incisive writer drew comics as a child before switching over to novels. He had seen plenty of movies growing up, as his grandfather owned a chain of theaters, but it wasn’t until he moved to Paris in his 20s that he felt he received a real education through the city’s Cinémathèque Française. His friend had tasked him with editing a collection of film criticism, and the rest is history. Rosenbaum would go on to write for numerous publications and organizations, but he landed his longest gig at the Chicago Reader, serving as its chief film critic from 1987 to 2008. Since then, he’s continued to write about film, and his pieces both new and old can be found on his personal website, jonathanrosenbaum.net. Hat & Beard Press recently released a new book titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader , which collects more than one hundred essays and reviews from 1964 to 2023. Previously uncollected in his prior books, the pieces are presented in chronological order to provide an autobiographical look into his life and practice. I spoke with Rosenbaum over the phone to discuss the winding trajectory of his career, the role of a film critic, and his deep love for jazz.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Can you talk to me about growing up in Florence, Alabama?

Jonathan Rosenbaum: I can’t say that my experience was typical. I grew up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and with a grandfather who ran a chain of movie theaters—my father worked for him. My family was very much respected in town, largely because of my grandfather. He was a philanthropist who helped to pay for the

town library. He even gave a large contribution to build a Christian church. It was because of his reputation that we were treated as special.

Did you spend much time with your grandfather?

I did, but when I was young, I was afraid of him—he was a commanding personality. He was the only one in the family, aside from me, who could be described as a movie bu . He wasn’t a sophisticated movie fan, but he enjoyed movies a lot, especially musicals. He’d come to the States when he was a teenager, but he still had a heavy accent and spoke Yiddish with his wife.

I was generally not happy in Alabama. I left it the ﬁrst chance I got, and it was to go away to a boarding school. You know, teenagers are tough on other teenagers, and I was given a rough time in a lot of ways. It was a boarding school in Vermont, so it was a di cult kind of culture. One of the reasons that my parents sent me there was because I was a hermit. I wasn’t into sports; I was expected to play ball with the other kids, but I didn’t.

Do you feel like there were any crucial experiences you had at the boarding school?

I was already very busy. Since I was in the fifth grade, I knew I was a writer, though I didn’t know I was gonna be a film critic. I wrote three novels when I was young, and I wrote my first when I was a senior in boarding school. The only classmate who asked to read it was Wally Shawn [actor Wallace Shawn], who was the son of the editor of the New Yorker. And because [Wally] was in my class, J. D. Salinger attended our graduation. At the same time, Wally wouldn’t give me his phone number. So during a holiday in New York, he’d ask me to come around to his apartment with his family, but he’d only give his phone number to class-

mates he considered an equal—he considered me a southern hick. He thought I was a good writer, but he was dismissive of me in a social way. It was an emotionally complicated situation. I had a nickname when I was at this school: “Gopher.” It was because I had buck teeth. But for all my troubles there, I was cer-

tainly happier being in Putney, Vermont, than in Alabama.

You mentioned that you were writing ever since you were in ﬁfth grade. What did you write?

RIN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES: A JONATHAN ROSENBAUM READER by Jonathan Rosenbaum Hat & Beard Press, hardcover, 500 pp., $ 40 hatandbeard.com/products/in-dreams-begin-responsibilities-a-jonathan-rosenbaum-reader

I put together comic books for a while, and the dialogue bubbles got bigger until I was writing stories and drawing pictures to go with them. Eventually, the pictures disappeared. [ Laughs. ] I was writing science fiction and fantasy stories, and you can ﬁnd three of the stories I wrote as a teenager on my website. I had a big success when I was quite young. When I was 13, I sold a one-page story to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I also won ﬁrst prize for the poetry competition in Junior Scholastic. I basically saw myself growing up to become a novelist.

Were there specific comics that inspired you?

It’s kind of embarrassing—it was stuff like Archie . But at the same time, the thing that had a really subversive e ect on me was Mad comics. To me, that was an avant-garde publication for kids. It’s not like there were a lot of comics to choose from in Alabama, and I don’t think my taste in comic books was signiﬁcant. I also read Classics Illustrated. It was whatever was around. I was also deeply a ected by a concert I went to of Spike Jones. Do you know him? Thomas Pynchon is a big fan and even wrote the liner notes for one of his CDs.

Yes, I know him. So many experimental musicians I’ve interviewed have told me that they were inspired by him.

His concert was the first mixed-media show I went to. There was music, but they showed ﬁlms at a certain point, and it had this sense of the wild and crazy—it was a comedy where anything could happen. There was freedom and it was irreverent. As with Mad , it was in rebellion against the grown-up world of what art was supposed to be like. That’s what impressed me.

What other concerts did you go to growing up?

You have to remember that I was in a small town in Alabama, so it’s not like there were a lot of choices. But I did attend a Louis Armstrong concert when I was still quite young. There’s a piece in my book about Armstrong, and he actually gave two performances—one for the white audience and one for the Black audience. This was because of Jim Crow laws. Louis Armstrong had a white drummer when he played, and other Black musicians couldn’t have done that at the time. It was exceptional.

The drummer was Barrett Deems—I remember seeing him when he was very old at a Chicago jazz club.

My family’s theaters had Black sections, and of course, other theaters didn’t permit Black people at all. Me and my brother were brought up by Black babysitters, and there’d be occasions where my parents were going to a picnic or something and would drop us off. We would sit with the babysitter in the Black section—we had to do that because it would’ve caused a disturbance if he sat with us in the white section. I remember one time we went to a drive-in [theater]—my family didn’t have any, so this was a competitor’s drive-in—and the Black babysitter had to crouch down in the back seat. It would’ve been illegal for him to be in the car. There were so many absurd things because of the Jim Crow laws.

I also remember that most movie theaters that had Black balconies had two windows at the box o ce. The Black people who went to the balcony paid less money for the tickets. When the Civil Rights bill passed, they would still keep this cheaper price for the balcony if you sat up there, and white people could sit up there now too. The di erences in prices, however, meant that segregation continued for a while since Black people had less money.

Do you feel like seeing all these things in your life were important for how you approached thinking about art in general?

My family was liberal, not radical. When I graduated from boarding school, I went to Highlander Folk School, which was the radical center in the south. It’s where the Montgomery bus boycott was planned. [Editor’s note:

Rosa Parks attended a desegregation workshop at Highlander four months before refusing to give up her bus seat, laying a foundation for the boycott.] Spending an entire summer at that place radicalized me. They wanted to integrate it with an equal number of Black and white kids, but they couldn’t get enough white kids—there was only one other white kid in my tent. It was a profound experience because I realized it was emotionally impossible to live in the south, or at least in Alabama. One day a guy came on the grounds with a shotgun, shot it in the air or at the ground, and then laughed at the Black people who were afraid. “Look at them run,” he said. Ordinary looking people, including sweet mothers with their babies, would scream obscenities. There were bricks and bottles thrown. We knew that the FBI

wouldn’t help, of course.

The day I got back home to Florence, I noticed that there were so many Black people, and I started to question if something was going on. I realized that this was the typical number you’d see on any Saturday afternoon, but that I hadn’t seen them before because, while growing up, they just weren’t a part of my life unless they were working as a servant, like [our] babysitter. I was discovering things about myself, and I realized how the system trained people to be racist. Things that I had grown up accepting became intolerable to me.

I was very fortunate to have a father who had gone to Harvard, had a very high IQ, and taught himself foreign languages. My mother was involved in the arts—she was a musician. And I grew up in the Frank Lloyd Wright house. I had this cultural background, but it functioned as a shield. I knew I wouldn’t have been happy staying there. Growing up, people considered Florence the best place in the universe—there was this provincial attitude. But the last time I went back, I couldn’t be there for more than a day without feeling uncomfortable. I only have a sister there now because the rest of the family has either died or moved away.

I know that you spent time in the 1960s dodging the draft.

One fortunate thing about coming from Florence was that there were a lot of people who enlisted, so there was a lot less danger of me being drafted. I wasn’t sure of that, though. I had an uncle on the draft board who advised me that it would be less dangerous if I were in graduate school. The reason I largely went to graduate school was so I wouldn’t be drafted, and I didn’t quit until I knew I was safe.

Before you were even assigned to do film criticism, were you always engaging with movies in an analytical or critical manner?

That’s too vast a question to answer simply. There were movies I liked and didn’t like, and I would sometimes talk about why, but I didn’t see myself as a ﬁlm critic—I saw myself as a ﬁction writer and novelist. When I wrote my third novel, which is when I was living in Paris, I was close to 30 and still saw myself as more of a literary writer. I wasn’t getting my fiction published, but I was getting my film criticism published.

I wanted to get into some of your criticism. At one point in your new book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, you deride the ways in which ﬁlmmakers drum up intensity or enthusiasm for a musical performance. What sort of things do you want to see when

Jonathan Rosenbaum COURTESY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

FILM

continued from p. 21

you’re watching a ﬁlmed performance?

The most basic thing is that I want to be able to follow it. What usually happens when jazz is involved is that you’ll hear the ﬁrst two bars and then a voiceover will tell you how great it is. [Laughs.] You can’t even hear what they’re playing anymore! They’re assuming that the audience is not interested. It becomes di cult to find many films that respect the music. Hollywood is built around respecting the bad taste of the people who make the movies rather than respecting the audience. There’s always this thing about blaming the audience, but the audience is not even known by the people who make the movies. They’re shifting the blame unfairly.

You have a piece in the book where you talk about how jazz becomes “Hollywoodized” sometimes.

Yes I do. And of all the movies about jazz musicians, the one that commits the greatest number of crimes is Scorsese’s New York, New York [1977]. The music is so poor and every detail about it is laughable to anybody who knows anything about it. It’s insulting to jazz bu s!

It’s funny how often films end up giving a false portrait of a region or city or scene because these details aren’t considered.

One of the things I respected about Elia Kazan, even though he cooperated with the McCarthyites, is that when he made movies set in the south, he was one of the only ones who made sure the accents were accurate. That’s because he hired somebody to make sure the regional accents were correct. Baby Doll [1956], A Face in the Crowd [1957], and Wild River [1960] are like perfect ﬁlms. Most ﬁlms set in the south are bogus when it comes to how people talk. I’m also a very big fan of [Phil Karlson’s] The Phenix City Story [1955]. It used a lot of local people. There are a lot of movies, like To Kill a Mockingbird [1962], that are totally phony. Gregory Peck never even remotely sounded like a southerner to me.

You also have album reviews in the book, including one on an expanded CD by Ahmad Jamal.

I have to say that I’m much more of a fan than a critic when it comes to jazz. I feel like I’m a

professional ﬁlm critic and even a professional literary critic, but I don’t consider myself a professional jazz critic.

What’s the distinction between a critic and a fan?

Even though I played piano a little bit and could play some jazz, I don’t have the experiences with it that I’ve had with literature and film. I didn’t study it in school. And even when I learned how to play, it came from picking up things from people, asking them how to play chords. I only took one film course in my life, but aside from seeing all these films for free when I was growing up in Alabama, I lived for five years in Paris and my real school was the Cinémathèque. I didn’t have anything comparable when it came to jazz.

I was able to write about jazz ﬁlms because when I was an assistant editor at the Monthly Film Bulletin, we had to review a lot of ﬁlms that hadn’t been reviewed before. It was a state-sponsored publication, so I would choose certain jazz films not just because I wanted to see them, but because I wanted to give them the proper appreciation. In any case, I’m considerably less knowledgeable about jazz.

checking yourself as a critic. You have one piece in the book where you reﬂect on how we judge actors. You talk about how your familiarity with an actor can initially impact how you judge their acting.

I’ve come to feel that most of the things that people take for granted about film criticism are illegitimate beliefs. Is the job of a critic to say that a film is good or bad? I would argue today that it’s meaningless to say that something is good or bad unless you say it’s good or bad for what or for whom. To assume something more general is to assume that everyone has the same taste or should have the same taste, which is crazy! It’s so obvious that a ﬁlm that is good for me may be bad for you, and that your reasons for disliking it are just as legitimate as my reasons for liking it. I think that so much of what criticism is, unfortunately, is deﬁned by the needs of the studio. They monitor and control a lot of what happens in criticism.

“I want people to think for themselves. It’s a strong belief of mine that film critics should not have the first or last word on any film.”

When did you feel like you could consider yourself a professional ﬁlm critic?

What transitioned me into being a film critic was that when I quit graduate school, I decided to move to Paris. I was hired by a friend. I’d been reading film criticism and was a big fan of film, so he gave me this job where I was editing a whole collection. For complicated reasons, it never came out. By the time I finished working on the book, I learned an awful lot, including learning about film critics themselves. There were things by Andrew Sarris, and I had touched base, even if it was by phone, with Manny Farber and Pauline Kael. That paved the way for me to become a film critic, even though I only wrote one piece for the collection—and it’s not even one I’ve reprinted.

This is making me think about the notion of

them. That already shows that the di erence between advertising and criticism is moot for the studios. Part of the con game that goes on with criticism is that every ﬁlm that comes out is supposed to be considered important the week it comes out, and then you’re supposed to forget about it. And again, that’s for the beneﬁt of the studio, not the public.

I was working with Universal when they were putting out all three versions of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil [1958] in a box set. They said that I had to use the terms “restoration” and “director’s cut.” None of the versions of Touch of Evil could be called either of those terms, but they still wanted me to use them. I said, “Can I put quotation marks around them?” “No problem.” [Laughs.] That explains the problem right there: They’re only interested in selling stu , and criticism is tolerated as long as it works as advertising.

I had a sobering experience when I was in London. I was and still am a big partisan of Jacques Rivette, and I was trying to convince a London distributor to distribute Céline and Julie Go Boating [1974]. They finally said, “We’ll distribute it under one condition: put together the pressbook and do it for free.” I agreed. But after the ﬁlm was released, what I discovered was that some of the most respected critics in London were copying entire sentences out of my pressbook, or were changing them slightly. And this was even if they disliked the film! It’s the easiest way to plagiarize—the public never sees the pressbook.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that a lot in music criticism especially, though I’ve seen it with ﬁlm criticism too. With the trade publications especially, it can feel like the critics are all just pawns.

And how many people knew that Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s TV show was, at the end of its run, produced by the Disney studio? It didn’t mean that they had to like every Disney ﬁlm, but it did mean they had to review all of

When I was working for the Monthly Film Bulletin, the magazine’s agenda was to basically write credits and reviews of every film released in the UK. What happened with certain foreign films was that we had nothing to go by beyond a sentence in the press handout—it wouldn’t even be a pressbook. And sometimes we wouldn’t be able to see a film and we’d have to describe it by just rewriting that single sentence. And of course there were a lot of other loopholes that were problematic. It was the belief of most English people who read the Monthly Film Bulletin that the complete credits were objective and the reviews were subjective. But we all know, if we’ve done any research into film—especially Hollywood film—that the people who are given credit aren’t always the people who did the work. What we were doing without meaning to was perpetuating the lies of the studio. Though, if we knew that some of the credits were di erent, we would try to do something. Still, if we were contesting too many things, the studios might not even give us press credentials anymore. It always reflects back to the control that the studios have.

I visited your home recently while you were in the process of selling your entire DVD collection. You mentioned that a lot of ﬁlms that were previously difficult to see are now online. Has your engagement with ﬁlm changed as a result of this?

It all depends. A lot changed when I retired from the Reader, too. I went to see two movies on the big screen recently— Nickel Boys and The Apprentice . I ended up liking the latter

FILM

continued from p. 22

more than the former.

So you’re not going to the theater often nowadays?

It’s very rare. Sometimes I’ll go to festivals. It’s just easier for me to see as much as possible on my laptop, so not even on my TV. It can be so much of a hassle to go out.

You wouldn’t consider yourself a purist then about seeing ﬁlms on the big screen?

There are certain ﬁlms I feel that way about, but as an everyday practice—no. I’m very relaxed about it.

What ﬁlms do you think can only be understood in a theater?

Some of the big IMAX things. What was that ﬁlm with Sandra Bullock in outer space?

Gravity [2013]?

Yes, things like that wouldn’t be the same. Playtime [1967] is another. [Former Reader film critic] Dave Kehr loves the film as much as me, and he told me that there are certain details that he could only notice for the first time when he saw it on 65 mm.

Your DVD collection has o cially been sold now, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. Someone collected it all, and now I have to ﬁnd out how to get rid of all this shelving. [Laughs. ] The guy who bought my collection is a pediatrician and has a really beautiful screening room. His plan is that after everything is unpacked, he wants to have screenings. I proposed that I would do a film series and give lectures or lead discussions about them—it would be something like a film club. He’s very keen to do that, but it’ll take a while to get everything in order.

but only collect the films after I died. Once they decided that they weren’t going to buy it, I had the beneﬁt of the list I made of the whole collection. I realized that I had to sell it right away—I had run up a lot of debts. And having so much stu carried a certain weight. I feel a lot lighter on my feet now.

Going back to the Reader, I know that you really enjoyed your time there.

One of the great perks that I had at the Reader was that I had a virtually unlimited [word count] for my pieces. It wasn’t like that until the end, but it was like that for the first ten years, maybe even more. When I retired, the editor of the Reader wanted me to stay, and she was even willing to pay me more. But at that point, the Reader wasn’t giving me the same freedoms that I had when I ﬁrst started. Something that I think is crazy—and I never understood it—is that they would write about everything, including local politics, and almost everything they decided to eliminate when they were worried about ad revenue ended up seeming like suicide. Why compete with Time magazine if you know you’re gonna lose? The Reader started out as a newspaper for writers, but by the time I left, I feel like it became a newspaper for editors.

How so?

“This is maybe controversial, but I consider myself an artist.”

“I write in order to discover what I think rather than to express what I think.”

Originally what I wanted to do with my film collection was to sell it to the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, where they would pay me now

It was literally a ecting me in the sense that I originally had my o ce on the same ﬂoor as the editors but was later moved upstairs. I’m not trying to complain—I was very lucky in the way I was treated, I had a lot of freedom, and the editors were good. But at the same time, I would’ve liked to review books as well, but they had no desire for me to do that. The only time I did review books was when I insisted on it. [Former Reader editor] Alison True was a really nice person, but she took the position that every piece that is turned into the Reader had to be edited. For her, it was not conceivable that any piece could be so good that it wouldn’t need editing, and that became demoralizing after a certain period of time. You would know in advance that you would be edited—it didn’t matter how hard you tried to

make something perfect.

I never had that experience when I was at the BFI [British Film Institute]. Penelope Houston was one of the best editors I ever had. For her, it was sort of like, writers should aim for writing a piece that’s so good that it doesn’t need any editorial work, but that was an impossibility at the Reader. That’s what I mean when I say it became an editor’s paper and not a writer’s.

The longest piece I think I ever wrote [for the Reader ] was on Alain Resnais’s Mélo [1986]. The editor at the time was Michael Lenehan, and he basically told me, “We’re gonna run all of this, but don’t make a habit of making things this long.” That’s the closest I ever got to anyone restricting the length of my pieces. And I don’t think that anybody else working as a ﬁlm critic in America had that [luxury], not even Pauline Kael. It was extraordinary. I owe a lot to Dave Kehr because even though he never wrote pieces as long as I did, he set up certain standards and expectations about that space, which I was the beneﬁciary of.

Is there anything you hope people take away from reading the pieces you’ve written?

I want people to think for themselves. It’s a strong belief of mine that ﬁlm critics should not have the first or last word on any film. I think that what they do is a social function— they’re intervening and improving the level

of discussion. It’s not about telling people what to think.

This is maybe controversial, but I consider myself an artist. This is something that would be impossible if I wrote for the mainstream. When that happens, it’s the mainstream venues that deﬁne, label, and classify you. If you’re a niche writer like I am, you can brand yourself, and in a way it’s a late arrival for me. There are plenty of people who think [being a critic] is the ultimate in being pretentious. But when I wrote [my 1980 book] Moving Places, I originally wanted two short stories by other people and two essays by other people. I wanted to demonstrate that this book wasn’t about me. And I still feel that way. I tend to think that I use the opinions and observations of other people more than most critics do. In other words, I feel that part of my job is to steer people in the right direction, which includes leading people to other writers.

I end all my interviews with the same question, and I wanted to ask it to you: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I write in order to discover what I think rather than to express what I think. It’s a little bit like improvising. What keeps jazz interesting is that even the musicians don’t know what they’re going to play. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

NOV 2 THEE SACRED SOULS

NOV 10 LUPE FIASCO

NOV 14 MODEST MOUSE

NOV 15 TYCHO

NOV 16 DAWES

SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

NOV 17 CARIBOU

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

WITH YUNÈ PINKU

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE

MUSIC

CITY OF WIN

Nobody can say they made Ashlee Bankz

The south-side rapper makes a bold statement of self-suﬃciency with the new EP Go to Hell.

By JOSHUA EFERIGHE

City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Joshua Eferighe that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.

When Ashlee Bankz arrived at the photo shoot for the cover of her new EP, Go to Hell , she made her presence felt even before she came in sight of the cameras. The south-side rapper had set up the shoot in a West Garﬁeld Park warehouse, and her echoing footsteps on the building’s wooden ﬂoors preceded her into the room, growing louder as she neared. When Bankz did appear, her aura was as sharp and pronounced as that sound.

Dressed in black platform jeans adorned with rhinestones, an oversize white button-up shirt, and Rick Owens boots, Bankz clearly meant business. For her, “business” is more than a professional standard she’s adamant about—it describes how she conducts herself in all aspects of her life.

“Ashlee Bankz is a business. Like, this ain’t homegirl, your cousin,” she says. “Since I’ve been doing it, I’ve always taken it seriously. But I feel like in 2023, I stopped playing with me and about me.”

Now 30 years old, Bankz has been “doing it” in the rap game for more than a decade. She started rapping at 16, while still at Homewood- Flossmoor Community High School. She’d flirted with home recording but didn’t pursue rapping full-time until she was outed by friends. “I’ve always wanted to make music,” says Bankz. “I was 12 when I heard my voice for the ﬁrst time, recording on an iMac com-

puter. Then my best friend ratted me out and told people that I made music. So that’s how Ashlee Bankz became Ashlee Bankz.”

Bankz says she got her formal introduction to hip-hop in 2010, when she was brieﬂy part of a rap group called Tha Intavention. She was initially managed by a member of the group who went by Kwik—and she says that’s what inspired her mother, artist manager Beleshia McCulley, to launch her own career in the music industry. “My mother just started managing me, because Tha Intavention was no more,” Bankz says. “I am the reason she got into music.”

Bankz’s business relationship with her mom didn’t work out. But they were still family, and that natural proximity helped Bankz build relationships in the industry. Her mother, now better known as Lyrical, founded Lyrical Eyes Management in 2012. At the time, she was managing Tink and Lil Durk, then very early in their careers. She also worked with Chief Keef after he signed with Interscope that year.

“Now I’m being bold about me, because so many people have played with me. Now it’s like, I dare you to trap me. I dare you to tell me I can’t do something.”

“From 2012 to 2014, I was still around,” Bankz says. “Me and Tink did a song—that relationship came through my mom.” She says Lyrical also helped her get a feature from Lil Durk on her 2012 single “Let’s Get It.” “She would pull me in on certain stu , and that’s how a lot of relationships came,” Bankz explains. “And a lot of people came through my grandma’s house, from Tink to Durk, Queen Key, DGainz—my grandparent’s house is a staple that a lot of people came through in 2012.”

Chicago hip-hop had a watershed year in 2012. What’s often called “the Chicago Wave” broke that year, bringing national attention

Thu 11/21, 9 PM, Bassline, 2239 S. Michigan, $20, 21+

to the city’s scene and creating fertile ground for budding artists. A handful of them—Keef, Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa—ascended into the mainstream.

“I was a part of that 2012 era. I was out at the same time,” Bankz says. She strived alongside Chicago’s future superstars and achieved successes of her own. “I had a song called ‘I Called You’ on streaming that blew up during that blog era in 2017—that kind of went viral before ‘viral’ was a thing,” she recalls.

According to Bankz, “I Called You” racked up more than 200,000 streams on the mixtape site Spinrilla and aired during prime time on Chicago’s premier hip-hop station, WGCI. “I was hitting up Spinrilla—I think they had like a top-ten list, if I remember correctly, like the hottest songs of the week—I was damn on there. Like, every time I dropped, I was at the top of the list and top ten around 2016, 2017,” Bankz says.

After that, though, Bankz’s buzz died down. The friends and family in her corner, she says, weren’t the right people at the right time. The local scene was also tricky for her to navigate, she explains, because she was trying to establish herself alongside artists whose relatively high proﬁles sometimes kept her from getting the support she deserved. “My mom was at

the forefront of the Chicago scene with Durk and Tink. I wasn’t nurtured. I was in the background for a lot of stu ,” she says.

Bankz further explains that some of the people closest to her often dismissed her ideas. “Coming up, I was shunned; I was looked down on; I was told not to do certain things. Before anybody started wearing sunglasses, sunglasses had always been my thing. I was told when I was coming up that I didn’t need to wear sunglasses—or don’t do that, don’t do this—by management,” Bankz says. “And then years later, I saw a bunch of people doing it. Even my ﬁrst song that I dropped that went viral—‘I Called You’—my manager at the time told me not to drop it, and I went against the grain. Still today, that’s my biggest song. Anybody that was coming up, my name was right there with them. I was ahead of my time before I even knew it.”

From those frustrations, Ashlee Bankz the business was born. She’d started her own label, Rosemoor Records, in 2014, and eventually she decided to manage herself. Most important, she resolved to listen only to her own voice.

“I stopped listening to everybody—any and everybody around me. Friends and family, honestly,” she says. “They just didn’t believe

Ashlee Bankz THOUGHTPOET FOR CHICAGO READER

FENDIDA RAPPA & BIG MARCO (AKA SHAMAR), ASHLEE BANKZ

in me, to be honest with you—that’s the best way that I could put it. I wasn’t nurtured. If anything, I was torn apart more than I was built.”

Bankz’s experiences since then have strengthened her commitment to this path. “I’d say 2017 me took a risk on myself—like, you know what, I’m not finna keep playing the background, I’m not ﬁnna keep listening to these people. Imma just say fuck it and do what I need to do,” she says. “Twenty twentyfour me is like, yeah, fuck everybody.”

Go to Hell comes out Thursday, October 31, on Rosemoor. It’s the first half of a release with two parts, Bankz says. “There’s an A-side and a B-side. The A-side is called Go to Hell , and the B-side is called Please, Go to Hell.”

Bankz “likes doing different stuff” musically, and she says the EP will reflect the range of sounds on her 2024 singles: “Bliss,” “Tina Snow,” “No Upgrade,” “FNGM,” “Fya,” “Switch,” and “E-Book.” None of those songs will appear on Go to Hell, but the project will likewise mix pop elements with the nitty-

MUSIC

gritty bars Bankz is known for.

The new release is not only a demonstration of Bankz’s new take on her career, it’s also a sort of sequel to her 2023 EP Misery Loves Company

“Like, Misery Loves Company was me being aware that the company you keep plays a big role in how you are and the things that reﬂect on you,” she says. “So fast-forward: Go to Hell is like, OK, I got rid of the company that I kept. Now I’m being bold about me, because so many people have played with me. Now it’s like, I dare you to trap me. I dare you to tell me I can’t do something. Go to Hell is like the birth of a confident Ashlee Bankz—a bold Ashlee Bankz. Can’t nobody say they made me. I made me.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate communitydriven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond

MUSIC

CHICAGOANS OF NOTE

Kopano, multihyphenate cultural worker

“Whenever I can help make the crowd move or sing, there’s a type of unity that happens in the room. The energy elevates people.”

As told to D-M BROWN

Kopano is a multidisciplinary performing artist and cultural worker— singer, pianist, dancer, and DJ. They were born on the south side of Chicago, and they have family in South Africa. They’ve trained in jazz and refined their talents at the Merit School of Music, Oberlin College, and elsewhere. “I channel the spirit that takes me to other places,” they say.

On October 5, Kopano participated as a dancer in Cristal Sabbagh’s series Freedom From and Freedom To, which creates ad hoc groups of improvisers in music and movement. On September 8, they played their own songs at Taste of Chicago, paying homage to blues and house music as part of a six-piece band with guitarist Michael Damani, bassist Carmani Edwards, drummer Chris Sanchez, saxophonist Kevin King, and djembe player Hasani Cannon. Their recent DJ gigs (under the name Tsibinki) have included a Real Ones event at Navy Pier on July 27 celebrating 40 years of house and a September 21 opening set at Smoke & Mirrors spinning highenergy juke and footwork on a bill with Detroit trio HiTech.

IFREEDOM FROM AND FREEDOM TO Featuring seven sets by 33 dancers and musicians (including Kopano) improvising in small groups determined by chance. Sat 12/7, 7 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15, $10 students, all ages

Africa, I had a moment where I sang a solo, and people loved it. The experience left an impact on me, considering I didn’t think about singing at all until that point. I thought I was gonna be an actor or some shit like that.

But I was playing violin, and I hated it—it was agonizing. It was my first instrument, and it was too competitive and mean. There wasn’t a lot of space for creativity. That’s when I started teaching myself piano—singing and learning songs regularly. In sixth grade, I performed at another talent show. My 12-yearold self played “Love Song” by Sara Bareilles,

instruments from violin to voice. I went there for lessons in a Saturday program. I met a lot of really wonderful musicians through there, like Camila [Vick] of The.BlkRoom. I also met Eddie Burns [of the Burns Twins], who’s one of my friends from there.

That’s where I met my high school band, K-Mu. We would write songs and connect. It was a beautiful, organic, and expressive experience. Eddie Burns introduced me to the keyboardist, Tony Milano. He goes by Dante Milano now. And then our friend MJ [Johnathan Miller] was on bass. We all were in K-Mu and between 16 and 19 years old. The music was incredible, and the synergy was really magical. We were packing shows in high school.

t doesn’t matter how big, how small, or what the setup or instrumentation is—if you’re gonna go to a show of mine, you gon’ sing, you gon’ dance. Like, you just gotta do it. It’s something I learned that’s important in traditional African performance practices. Namely, that performance is a reciprocal relationship between the audience and the performer. In the States, we have this Western notion that the performer gives, gives, gives, gives, and the audience is there,

still and disengaged. That’s so wack.

I grew up cutting my teeth at Chicago jam sessions. It’s nice to grow up in a place full of cultures. I started playing violin when I was four years old, because my mom told us, “Listen, you guys are gonna play instruments, and that’s how you’re gonna get scholarships to go to Ivy League schools,” very type shit. I ended up playing violin for a mad long time. But when I was young at a preschool in South

and people responded like, “Oh my god. It was so good.” I had been practicing my ass o , so that felt good. I continued to play piano, sing, and write songs to express myself. I was going through a lot of emotional transformation, and the expression helped—having something to ﬁxate on really helped.

Around my sophomore year, I started attending weekend classes at the Merit School of Music jazz conservatory, where I switched

The very first show was in Eddie’s house, in his bedroom. And then the next show we played was at House of Blues. We sold out Martyrs’. We played at Reggies and many, many venues, even some that don’t exist anymore. We were just raw with it. People would just hear us play, and they’d be like, “Yo, we want you to play here.” And we’d be like, “All right.” And that’s how we were booked.

It was a really strong hiphop–jazz fusion vibe with a touch of neosoul. Ultimately, it was the quintessential Chicago sound. It was so versatile. Some songs were more poppy than others. The arrangements were cool and taught me a lot about songwriting and form in music, because we were breaking so many rules in form—in terms of having a single form that goes all the way through. So there’s no chorus, there’s no verse. In some ways, it’s like a poem, in that it’s like one complete thing, and then you run through the form again—it’s jazz inspired. Then, as all great bands do, the band broke up. I released my solo EP Just in Time for Love [in 2017], and Dante Milano helped. Soon after, I went to school at Oberlin College to study music.

If I had to describe my voice, I’d say my lower range is warm. And my range is large. I can belt, but I also have some lighter textures

Kopano onstage with their live band

DANIEL DELGADO

that I like to fit in, as well as a gentler feel. Many aspects of art and creation have an aspect of seduction, and I feel that my voice has that quality. Not necessarily in a sexual or explicit sense, but seduction as in there are things that we desire, whether it be truth or understanding or insight. And I think that, when I sing, the combination of lyrics—because I’m pretty intentional in my music—and the tone of my voice, which can be brighter or darker depending on how I want to deliver it, is seductive.

When I was playing violin, between two and 16 years old, I was also a ballerina. I quit both of them at the same time. But around 12 years old, I was in a South African dance group with my mom. It was a transformative experience for me to engage with my mother’s culture, because I always found a deep sense of belonging and comfort that I didn’t feel in America whenever I would go to South Africa and be with family.

There was also a moment after K-Mu where I took the time to step back from actively trying to advance my music career and give some time to who I am as a person. The creative industry is not an easy place. You have to be conﬁdent, intentional, and strategic. And as an artist, I think it’s important that the message is clear. Not in a didactic type of way, but it was Toni Cade Bambara who said, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible,” and I agree with that.

When I took the time to connect with my craft, I had a recollection of being 12 and

engaging with all aspects of performance in South Africa. I’m very much inspired by the concept of “everything is everything.” In daily life, for people in South Africa, people have songs for everything. They’re singing all the time; they’re dancing all the time. And so for me, that uniﬁcation of performance art brought a sense of completion to the purpose of performance that I’m pursuing. I want my expression to encourage others to express themselves.

A lot of my dance is informed by modern dance and ballet, but it includes Chicago-style and African-style movements. I am a part of the dance squad Praise Mother. In my dancing, there are big, sudden movements. Some are very graceful. There are turns, there are spins, and there’s an interaction with the musicians. I move the most after I sing something—when I’m opening a song, or I’m in the middle of a song.

While people are soloing, maybe I’m moving and asking the crowd to follow me and leading them through some type of movement. Whenever I can help make the crowd move or sing, there’s a type of unity that happens in the room. The energy elevates people. People are like, “Oh my goodness, I was singing my heart out with strangers.” For someone to trust you with their joy is signiﬁcant.

So a lot of the movements are happening. Sometimes there will be simpler, line-dance movements; other times I’ll do some floor work. Sometimes we’ll do drum talk with me and the djembe. Hasani plays djembe, and he’ll

be soloing and I will be dancing— that’s a reciprocal form of energy where we push each other to reach that God space of performance.

At Oberlin, I did have the opportunity to go deep with myself. It’s the most time I had to work on my voice technically, to learn about mediation and facilitation, and to have access to academic journals.

Sometimes you got to be like that person in the anime who goes away to the temple to train so that they can come back and be awesome. That’s kind of what Oberlin was for me. It wasn’t the most fun experience, but it whipped me into shape.

It was then that I just started DJing. The last year and a half of college, I was throwing parties with my roommates, and they were lit parties. I’m one of the COVID DJs—I’m not even gonna front. I’m one of the people who started DJing when we was stuck inside all day and nobody was

at the club. I was living with my friend Choya [Webb], who’s a DJ too. So that was pretty inspirational. We was just practicing, practicing, practicing. And then when I returned to Oberlin to ﬁnish school, that’s when I started throwing the parties. When I came back to Chicago, people realized I DJed, because I would go on Instagram Live sometimes.

I haven’t released a body of work since my ﬁrst 2017 solo EP, but I recently received an Individual Artists grant from the City of Chicago and will be using that to record my project.

The project I’m working on is supposed to be about the journey of being born into a world you don’t understand and coming into understanding with yourself. It’s about what you accept and what you release. It’s me laying to rest the past ten years of work I’ve been doing on myself, on my music, and on my values and practice, and being able to celebrate that. I look forward to sharing this work with everyone, and I pray that it brings the healing that it’s intended to bring—that it makes you feel clean. v

m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com

Check out the Reader’s first-ever Occult Issue!

Kopano the dancer PENNY LI

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of October 31

Stevie Wonder celebrates love, unity, and democracy at the United Center

STEVIE WONDER

Sat 11/2, 8 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, $49–$129.50. b

AS A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL falling in love with music, I inhaled my mother’s massive Motown Records collection. Her Stevie Wonder albums became my obsession, and the multi-instrumentalist and vocalist quickly rose to the very top of the list of musicians I’ll forever revere. Three decades later, nothing has changed. Wonder still has my respect and adoration— and he indisputably remains one of the greatest living American artists.

Born Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1950, Wonder was a child prodigy. Following his parents’ divorce, he moved to Detroit with his mother and siblings at age four, and at 11 he signed to Motown (he also changed his last name to Morris, an old family name). Two years later, in 1963, he scored his ﬁrst number one hit: the jazzy two-part single “Fingertips,” released under the name “Little Stevie Wonder,” showcased his age-defying talent and charisma. By the end of the decade he’d dropped the “Little” and went on to have one of the greatest album runs of all time—his projects between 1972 and 1984 are beyond extraordinary.

At 74 years old, Wonder has amassed a discography that includes more than 20 solo albums, three soundtrack albums, four live records, and nearly 100 singles—not to mention the dozens of songs he’s written for others. He’s also historically used his platform to share his political beliefs; he’s advocated for peace and unity for decades, and in recent months, he’s given his support to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. In August, he performed his anthemic 1972 hit “Higher Ground” at the Democratic National Convention, and in September, he announced a short fall tour leading up to the general election on November 5. Wonder’s new single, “Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart,” from the upcoming album Through the Eyes of Wonder (due in March 2025), is an acoustic thought-provoker that dares us to put aside our di erences and come together for the betterment of our country. This United Center concert o ers a very rare and very exciting chance to witness Wonder’s genuine artistry and hear his healing voice in person. The future is uncertain, so don’t think twice about getting tickets. —CRISTALLE BOWEN

FRIDAY1

Bronze Air Blue Gowns open. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+

Bronze have been cra ing hushed, cinematic tunes for two decades, and on their new self-titled LP, these so -pop perfectionists might’ve reached their melodious apex. The group formed in 1999, after singer Scott McGaughey and multi-instrumentalist Dylan Ryan met as English majors at DePaul and bonded over noisy underground music. (Ryan has drummed in rock and punk bands of various flavors, including Cursive, the Red Krayola, Man Man, Michael Columbia, and his own groups Sand and Ether Feather.) In Bronze they balance a fierce DIY approach with intricate studio technique, and though they’re o en saddled with the “yacht rock” tag, they predate that smug term by several years; according to McGaughey, they wanted to create “smoove pop songs that fans of Chicago, Fleetwood Mac, and Sade might enjoy swimming in or dancing to.” Bronze’s music does attract comparisons to big-boat spokesmen (Steely Dan, Hall & Oates), but their inﬂuences also include quirky 70s singersongwriters (Al Stewart, Michael Franks) and 80s new-wave and pop experimenters (Roxy Music, Prefab Sprout, Tangerine Dream). Ryan splits his time between Los Angeles and Chicago, and in 2017 he recruited like-minded California cohort Nic Johns (who’s worked with the Motels, Ben Lee, and on various soundtracks) to make Bronze a trio.

Meticulously assembled over seven years, Bronze shimmers with warm analog textures and relaxed, pillow-talkin’ hooks. The ambitious band enlisted a huge roster of guests, including west-coast studio greats such as ﬁlm composer Heather McIntosh and Motels saxophonist Marty Jourard. The hornadorned lead single, “Jewelry Is Magic,” has a dusky vibe that recalls Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”— and it recently popped up in the Elizabeth Olsen TV show Sorry for Your Loss. And because I love 10cc and Gerry Raﬀerty, the low-key decadence of the record’s opening track and third single, “Light on Shadow,” really caught my ear.

At this record-release concert, Bronze will play the entire new album as well as some surprises. For the occasion, they’ve pulled together a group of local talent, including Axis: Sova founder Brett Sova

COURTESY

(who plays on the Bronze dance-ﬂoor ﬁller “ESP”), Jeanine O’Toole (the 1900s), Dan Browning (Cave), Josh Johannpeter (Mahjongg), Nate Lepine (the Nick Mazarella Quintet), and Nick Sednew (Chicago Afrobeat Project). Opening the show are Air Blue Gowns, a breezy, stoner-ish country-rock band with Jim Becker of Califone. —STEVE KRAKOW

Foxing From Indian Lakes and Pictora Vark open. 6:30 PM, Outset, 1675 N. Elston, $20. b

Almost a year ago, Saint Louis emo band Foxing took a joint headlining tour with the Hotelier from Worcester, Massachusetts, playing 16 dates in November and 17 more in February. Both groups performed early-career albums in their entirety: The Albatross (2013) and Home, Like Noplace Is There (2014), respectively. They billed the tour as a tenth-anniversary celebration for two landmark emo records, which rubbed me the wrong way—and not just because it means we’re about to get flooded with reunions and commemorative concerts by other fourth-wave emo bands. From the ﬁrst time I heard Foxing and the Hotelier, they stood out from the rest of their scene. Their forward-looking vision helped lend legitimacy to emo as a whole, just by association, but most other fourth-wave emo acts lacked either band’s ingenuity or thoughtfulness. Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t think artists who’ve distinguished themselves with new ideas should distract from that virtue with this sort of easy nostalgic framing.

Foxing in particular have evolved considerably since the quasi-symphonic grandeur of The Albatross . They’ve taken such dazzlingly huge swings on subsequent releases that I’ve been impressed even when they don’t solidly connect—on 2021’s Draw Down the Moon, for instance, their glistening synth pop drifts toward somnambulance. And Foxing’s home runs can convince you they’re the only band that matters, the way the feral arena rock of 2018’s Nearer My God did for me. Their fifth studio full-length, the new Foxing (Grand Paradise/Miscellaneous), builds on the band’s prog-rock splendor by cranking up the scalding screamo intensity. Foxing front man Conor Murphy sings about parasitic tech-poisoned capitalism and how it drains society’s collective soul, and the band sound like they’re struggling mightily against it—their desperate ﬁght gives the music an urgent frisson, as though they might tear themselves to pieces. Foxing seem to win out by a hair in every song, making it to the end only by giving everything they can. In a track as sprawling as the eight-minute single “Greyhound,” this feeling of relief from having barely prevailed can carry you through the rest of the day—and sometimes that has to be enough.

—LEOR GALIL

MUSIC

Heavy Chicago II day one See also Sat 11/2 and Sun 11/3. Today’s bill, headliner ﬁrst, is Bongripper, Pelican, Wraith, Avernus, and Motherless. 5:30 PM, Avondale Music Hall, 3336 N. Milwaukee, $51.29, two-day passes $89.43 (Fri 11/1 and Sun 11/3) or $89.95 (Fri 11/1 and Sat 11/2), three-day pass $100.26. 17+

It seems so obvious in hindsight: Chicago is one of the best metal towns in the United States, if not the world, so why shouldn’t it host a weekend-long festival devoted to all things heavy? Last year’s inaugural Heavy Chicago fest was a rousing success, and its organizers, Last Rites promoter Sean Duﬀ y and Live Wire Lounge founder Dave Hornyak, have attracted top talent for the second edition. Both are deeply knowledgeable veterans of the local music scene with stacked contact lists, and they’ve curated the fest with a multigenerational approach and an eye toward sonic diversity.

Friday’s lineup culminates in the one-two punch of coheadliners Bongripper and Pelican—two of Chicago’s finest instrumental bands of the past couple decades. But the biggest story of the night might be the return of local gothic-metal masters Avernus, who released their first full-length since 1997, Grievances, in September. Kicking oﬀ the show are Motherless, the new project of Atlas Moth front man Stavros Giannopoulos and members of Without Waves, who made their live debut at a Heavy Chicago a erparty at Live Wire last year.

Saturday brings Syracuse hardcore legends Earth Crisis and doom-metal supergroup Legions of Doom, whose members have played in Trouble, the Skull, Saint Vitus, Leadfoot, and more. Their debut album, The Skull 3, is a powerful homage to and lament for Eric Wagner, former front

Foxing COURTESY TERRORBIRD

MUSIC

continued from p. 31

man of Trouble and the Skull, who died of complications from COVID in 2021. Milwaukee band the Crosses, fronted by Daniel Kubinski of hardcore greats Die Kreuzen, will deliver a set of Die Kreuzen songs. Grindcore and death-metal unit Earthburner will perform material from their upcoming LP Permanent Dawn , which they’ll have for sale a week ahead of its release. Sunday’s bill features Texas groove-metal outﬁt Pissing Razors, local black-metal band Lurid, and the Skull—who’ll play a special set celebrating their shared history with Trouble. The final band of Heavy Chicago 2024 will be Miami prog-metal genre benders Cynic, who released a three-song live EP, Audiotree From Nothing, in May. Collectively, this lineup is steeped in tradition— you can hear decades of sweaty, fierce independence, hard-earned muscle memory, and heart devotion to a local and national scene that’s weathered many storms and mourned many losses to keep the flames lit for future metalheads. Heavy Chicago has a dynamic pricing system, so the sooner you buy tickets, the more headbanging value you’ll get for your buck.

—MONICA KENDRICK

SATURDAY2

Heavy Chicago II day two See Fri 11/1 and Sun 11/3. Today’s bill, headliner ﬁrst, is Earth Crisis, Jasta, Legions of Doom, Earthburner, the Crosses, Usurper, and Masonic Wave. 5:30 PM, Avondale Music Hall, 3336 N. Milwaukee, $61.60, two-day passes $89.95 (Fri 11/1 and Sat 11/2) or $99.74 (Sat 11/2 and Sun 11/3), three-day pass $100.26. 17+

Stevie Wonder See Pick of the Week on page 30. 8 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, $49–$129.50. b

Swirlies Astrobrite open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, sold out, wait list $32.96. 21+

Swirlies formed in 1990, after Boston punk Rusty Nails (who’d later move to Chicago and make the underground horror flick Acne ) tried to start a Go-Go’s cover band with guitarists and singers Damon Tutunjian and Seana Carmody. Nails soon moved on, but Tutunjian and Carmody kept going, switching tracks to write original material that drew on their mutual love of shoegaze. “In 1989, not many people in Boston were listening to My Bloody Valentine,” Tutunjian told Retro Futurista in July. With that choice, Swirlies marginalized themselves aesthetically, but they didn’t sequester themselves socially from the punks who dominated the scene. Their ﬁrst release

was a 1991 split cassette with Providence hardcore band Dropdead, home dubbed in an edition of a few dozen and given away at an in-store show. Swirlies adopted a neither-here-nor-there relationship to punk, maintaining ties to the scene but not to the style—and this helped them avoid the pitfalls that turned lesser shoegaze groups gray and boring. For nearly the entire history of the genre, Swirlies have made shoegaze that feels constantly in flux but never abandons its familiar swaddling warmth. They’ve played around with Krautrock, electronica, and several idiosyncratic flavors of indie rock, incorporating drum-machine beats, vocoders, organ drones, synthesizers, field recordings, and whatever else would fit. Tutunjian has been the lone constant member, and when Carmody le the band in early 1994, Swirlies had already undergone several personnel changes. Bassist Andy Bernick le in early 1993, replaced by Morgan Andrews, and a er Bernick rejoined a few months later, the band had two bassists until Andrews quit. Eventually Swirlies evolved into a “Tutunjian and whoever is available” situation—their albums have included at least a dozen different players, the live band more than 30. I feel like it’d help if everyone wore name tags onstage! Per a Reddit AMA in October, these days

Tutunjian is joined by Bernick on bass and keys, Deb Warfield on vocals and keys, Elliott Malvas on guitar, Kevin Shea on drums, and occasionally Wesley Bunch on bass and keys.

Since 2005, Swirlies have released only live recordings, all of which share the title Swirlies’ Magic Strop. They put out the ﬁ h album in that series, Swirlies’ Magic Strop: Tonight . . . , in 2018. They’re touring in support of a new vinyl reissue of 2003’s Cats of the Wild: Volume Two, for now available only at their shows. It arrives as shoegaze’s latest wave brings in new fans hungry to learn about the style’s breadth and history. I hope some of them find their way to Swirlies, because every shoegaze fan needs to hear more songs like the sweet but screwy “Vigilant Always,” from 1993’s Blonder Tongue Audio Baton . Its strange tempo changes, delicate vocal harmonies, and sudden outbursts of fuzz throw me for a loop every time I listen to it. —LEOR GALIL

SUNDAY3

Heavy Chicago II day three See Fri 11/1 and Sat 11/2. Today’s bill, headliner ﬁrst, is Cynic, Pissing Razors, Profanatica, the Skull, Putrid Pile, Lurid, and Exegesis. 5:30 PM, Avondale Music Hall, 3336 N. Milwaukee, $61.60, two-day passes $89.43 (Fri 11/1 and Sun 11/3) or $99.74 (Sat 11/2 and Sun 11/3), three-day pass $100.26. 17+

MONDAY4

Poison Girl Friend Computerwife opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, sold out, minors permitted with parent or guardian. 18+

Noriko Sekiguchi, better known as Poison Girl Friend, is behind some of the most lustrous downtempo, trip-hop, and late-night pop music in post–economic bubble Japan. The Yokohama-born artist

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

was inspired by the British clubs she visited in 1989 and soon began utilizing a drum machine to make her own pop music. By 1990, she’d returned home and formed the Poison Girl Friends. Zany new wave was ubiquitous in 1980s Japan, and the group’s 1991 self-titled EP includes an example, “You Never Did Understand,” which rubs up against the baggy, down-home “Start Worrying (Use Your Brain).”

Though Sekiguchi’s songcra was evident from the start, it became fully formed after she went solo. Her 1992 album, Melting Moment, is especially lush, updating the previously recorded “Hardly Ever Smile (Without You)” with a stirring string arrangement that blankets the rest of the instrumentation. Sekiguchi’s delicate vocals grant her tracks emotional and structural he ; on the eﬀervescent “FACT 2,” her spoken delivery adds ineﬀable cool to the blippy electronics, even when she sings “Do you love me like you used to?” with the sort of vulnerability that evokes the pangs of tossing and turning over a breakup at 2 AM.

Sekiguchi nails this particular zone of alienation and intimacy. On 1993’s “Doomed Love,” her breathy vocals weave between whispers and something more fully sung, a style that harks back to erotic Japanese pop music of the 1970s; it’s eﬀortlessly dramatic and imbued with a complex mixture of feelings. Her arrangements have also become more immaculate with time; 1994’s “Love Is . . . ” marries hand percussion, hushed vocals, and gliding strings into a kaleidoscopic reverie. Sometimes, it’s about feeling the texture of every instrument—1994’s “Tout Est Rouge” cycles through electronic glitches, sweet coos, sparse piano melodies, and field recordings in what feels like a four-minute cinematic pan. In the late 90s, Sekiguchi released music in the duo Kiss-O-Matic, and during the 2010s she put out two more albums under the Poison Girl Friend moniker. Thanks to YouTube algorithms, a 2021 compilation of 1990s Japanese electronic music that included her work, and the renewed popularity of trip-hop among younger listeners, her catalog has drawn new fans as she continues to pursue new ideas. Last year, she collaborated with Kiss Facility on “So Many Ways,” and this month she released a single called “The October Country.” This Lincoln Hall show is part of Poison Girl Friend’s debut U.S. tour. —JOSHUA MINSOO KIM v

The Skull perform at Heavy Chicago II on Sunday. COURTESY HEAVY CHICAGO

Noriko Sekiguchi, aka Poison Girl Friend COURTESY THE ARTIST

Swirlies COURTESY THE ARTIST

JOBS

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Business Analyst (Chicago, IL) to work as a liaison among stakeholders to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. REQS: This position reqs a Bach deg, or forgn equiv, in Tech or Bus Admin or a rel ﬂd + 2 Yrs of exp as a proj mgr, sys analyst, or a rel position. Telecommuting permitted. Applicants who are interested in this position should submit a complete resume in English to hrciapp@bcbsil.com, search [Business Analyst / R0026599. EOE].

Commercial Technology Architect Enterprise Solutions – SAP Procurement Mars Information Services, Inc.: Commercial Technology Architect Enterprise Solutions – SAP Procurement (Formerly known as: Commercial (Procurement) Technology Solution Architect – Direct Procurement) – Chicago, IL. Partnering w/ key stakeholders across business segments to deliver new commercial technology solutions for Mars Information Services, Inc. Job reqs Bach’s deg in Comp Engg, Mgmt Info Sys, or a rltd ﬂd + 7 yrs in any job title involving exp in Procure to Pay domain w/ responsibilities for solution design, product mgmt & sys implementation for SAP ECC, SAP SRM, & Ariba within the Consumer-Packaged Goods industry. Up to 25% intl & dom travel reqd for biz mtgs. Tlwk permitted up to 2 days per wk. To apply, send resume identifying Job Code 137 to MarsTA-PIC@ effem.com. No calls.

UI Health – University Health Service -Clinical Practice Data Analyst Coordinator Univ Health Service, at the Univ of IL College of Medicine Chicago (UIC), located in a large metropolitan area, is seeking full-time Clinical Practice Data Analyst Coordinator to assist the department with the following responsibilities: Under direction and supervision, conduct full clinical data analysis to include requirements, activities, and design; Develop analysis and

reporting capabilities and monitor performance and quality control plans to identify improvements; Facilitate evaluation and improvement of quality performance by presenting complex information in an understandable and compelling manner customized to the audience; Collaborate with clinicians and senior leaders to design and perform more complex analyses, database design development, and report creation; Develop project-specific data management goals that address areas such as data analytic updates, reporting, and work-flow processes; Design or create merged data files and/or warehouse data sets to provide easy customer access to an integrated repository of clinical, financial, and demographic data supporting the health system’s analysis, planning, and improvement needs; Identify methods to streamline and automate data upload process to increase the speed of reporting results and to reduce errors; Utilize specialized knowledge of healthcare data analytics to perform tasks; Supervise the orientation and work performance of lower-level staff; Perform other duties and participate in special projects as assigned. Some periodic travel may be required for local travel in between worksite locations. This position minimally requires a Bachelor’s degree or its foreign equivalent in Healthcare Information; Healthcare Economics; Health Outcomes, Policy & Economics; Statistics; Finance; or related field of study; and 2 yrs of data analyst or data management work experience in a clinical or healthcare related field... For fullest consideration, please submit CV, cover letter, and 3 professional references by 11/4/2024 to Shanelle Brandon, University of IL Chicago, University Health Services, 835 South Wolcott Street, Suite E144, Chicago, IL 60612 or via email to shanelle@ uic.edu UIC is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans, & individuals w/ disabilities are encouraged to apply. UIC may conduct background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer letter. Background checks will be performed in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As a qualifying federal contractor, the University of Illinois System uses E-Verify to verify employment eligibility. The University of Illinois System requires candidates se-

lected for hire to disclose any documented ﬁnding of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment and to authorize inquiries to current and former employers regarding findings of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment. For more information, visit https://www.hr.uillinois. edu/cms/One.aspx? portalId=4292&page Id=1411899 University of Illinois faculty, staff and students are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. If you are not able to receive the vaccine for medical or religious reasons, you may seek approval for an exemption in accordance with applicable University processes.

Stantec Consulting Services, Inc seeks Project Engineers for Chicago, IL to perform site evals & prep ﬁeld survey reports. Bachelor’s in Mechanical Eng/closely related field +4yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills: Comprehensive knowledge of HVAC nomenclature, design tech, materials, sys components, construction tech, related eng sys, & building codes; exp w/reading, analyzing, & interpreting tech docs, speciﬁcations, technical procedures, & gov regs; CAD; Revit; Trane TRACE; exp w/ preparing comprehensive reports, business correspondence, & procedure manuals. Prof Eng License req’d. 10% domestic travel req’d. Send resume: HRApply@ stantec.com & specify “Project Engineers” in subject line. REF ID: NS

Accountant Accountant, SPAAN Tech Inc. in Chicago, IL. Analyze financial info & prepare ﬁnancial reports. Analyze accounting discrepancies. Monthly reconciliations. Process AP/ AR. Payroll & year-end processing & tax strategy. Req: master’s degree in accounting or related field. Email resume to HR@SpaanTech.com.

Environmental Health and Safety Advisor

FERNDALE CONSTRUCTION INC. Seeks an Environmental Health and Safety Advisor. Mail resume to 1440 Renaissance Dr Suite 300, Park Ridge, IL

PMI Kyoto Packaging Systems, Inc. seeks Data and Project Management Specialist w/ Bach or for deg equiv in CS, IS, Proj Mngmt or rel ﬂd & 2 yrs exp in job oﬀer or IT incl IT infrastr devp & implem of info syst CRM & MRP. Apply to HR, 850 Pratt Blvd., Elk Grove Village, IL 60007 or https://www.pmi kyoto.com/about-pmi/ career-opportunities/

Position Available: UIC IT Technical Associate (Sr. Business Intelligence Analyst The Offc of Technology Solutions, at the Univ of IL Chicago, located in a large metropolitan area, is seeking full-time IT Technical Associate (Sr. Business Intelligence Analyst) to asst dept w/ the following responsibilities: Under direction/sprvsion, gthr info requirements & retrieve/ mine data sources using computer programs; Actively monitor recurring & nonrecurring reports for accuracy & reasonableness; Identify, establish & maintain quality data sources; Work w/ IT to ensure quality data sources are established & maintained; Develop a data strategy through design & establishment of info systems that manage, store, file, retrieve, & analyze data for statistical summary reports, longitudinal tracking, & ad hoc reporting; Serve as lead subject matter expert to other staff; Mentor colleagues on business intelligence processes, software (such as Tableau), best practices, & share experiences to strengthen the team’s success; Analyze current & hist info, recognize trends & create benchmarks against peer institutions for comparative analysis; Produce recurring metrics & reports & create new reports as requested; Perf other rltd duties & participate in spec proj as assgnd. Some travel may be periodically req for previously sched evnts, attd confrcs, &/or prof dvlmnt. This position minimally requires a Bach deg or foreign equiv in Comp Sci, Mgmnt Info Sys, or rltd field; The min of 5 yrs progressively more responsible IT experience w/in Business Systems Analysis; Demonstrated exp in developing/implementing new & enhancements to existing systems, including evaluating business requirements & recommending system alternatives; A certification such as Certified Analytics Professional (CAP), project management, or certification in a data analytics tool such as Tableau Software; Demonstrated knowledge of data mining, data warehouse tools, & relational databases; Expert skill level in BI tools such as Tableau; Proficient in database query languages such as SQL; Demonstrated proficiency in ETL, scripting, & data extraction from cloud srvcs such as Azure & Amazon Web Services; Proficient in data interchange protocols such as XML; Proficient in MS Excel incl pivot tables.

For fullest consideration, please submit CV, cvr ltr, & 3 prof references by 11/16/2024 to Margot Wosko, Univ of IL Chicago, Tech. Sol., 200 RRB, MC 010, 728 Roosevelt Rd, Chicago IL 60607 or via email at mwosko2@ uic.edu. UIC is an EOE including Disability/Vets.

Huron Consulting Services, LLC has an opening for a Salesforce Consulting Manager in Chicago, IL to perform technical and solution architecture design, development, prototyping, and release management. $148,949.00/yr. send resume to globalmobility@ huronconsultinggroup. com. Must reference job 21756.8.3.

Software Engineer w/ McKinsey & Co., Inc. US (Chicago, IL). Contribute to all aspects of the s/w dvlpmnt life cycle, incl design, dvlpmnt, documentation, testing, & ops. Telecommuting permitted. Req’s Master’s in Comp Sci, S/W Engg, or rel field, or foreign degree equiv + 1yr of s/w dvlpmnt exp. Email your resume to CO@ mckinsey.com & refer to Job # 7628339.

Senior Product Manager, Platform (SMB) Enova Financial Holdings, LLC seeks Senior Product Manager, Platform (SMB) in Chicago, IL to lead prdct rdmp dvlpmnt. Telecomm. (remt wrk) prmtd. Apply at jobpostingtoday. com/ Ref #15856.

Beyond Finance (Chicago, IL) seeks Assoc. Product Mgr w/ BS in ind. and ops engr, prod. management, or related +1 yr exp in prod. management or related. Must have exp in each of the following: 1) Dvlping and managing pymt. integrations platforms in fintech ind. to streamline pymt. processes & enhance user exp.; 2) Integrating and utilizing call ctr platforms to enhance CS ops and improve call ctr eff.; and 3) Mtrg KPIs and observability of prod. functionality using NewRelic and Looker, inc. rollouts, debugging, & stack impvs. Apply: Send resume to: bllcrecruiting@ beyondfinance.com w/ “Associate Product Manager” in subject line. Morningstar, Inc. seeks a Principal Software Engineer (multiple positions) in Chicago, IL for designing, coding, and debugging software (5%). BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a

technology-rltd field or foreign equiv & 8 yrs of software engineering exp. Add’l speciﬁc skills req’d. For position details & to apply, visit: https://www. morningstar.com/careers; ref. job ID REQ-045999.

Senior Business Analyst positions avail w/ McKinsey & Co, Inc. US in Chicago, IL. Determine & apply analytical skills & tech expertise to mgmt consult engagements & complete discrete pieces of study/work stream such as data gathering, factual & stats analys. Telecommuting permitted. Req’s Bachelor’s in Bus Admin, Fin, Econ, or non-bus undergrad degree, & 2 yrs exp as Business Analyst w/ a major top-tier int’l mgmt consulting firm. Domestic & int’l travel typically required. Dest and freq impossible to predict. Salary Range: $112,000 - $204,000 / yr. Email resume to CO@mckinsey.com and refer to CTR10SBA. Multiple positions.

Front End Developer

Building performant, scalable and secure web applications/ APIs, utilizing APIs with C# and SQL Server systems, participating in the full software development lifecycle with requirements, writing computerprogramming code as required to meet clients’ goals and contracted services, writing code to integrate into existing client software; creating innovative functionality for existing program; operating and maintaining the system; providing continuous improvement to the program; testing software performance to ensure the delivery of an accurate, functional, and satisfactory end product; to identify problems and suggest changes; analyzing user and customer needs, and software requirements to determine feasibility of design and among others. Mail résumé to Amgaabaatar Purevjal, iCodice LLC, 5005 Newport Dr, Suite# 505, Rolling Meadows, IL 60008

SAP UI5 Consultant Havensight Consulting Group is seeking a SAP UI5 Consultant in Chicago, IL. Define and formulate technical design for custom web and mobile applications based on SAP Fiori / UI5 Mobile, SAP MDK and SAP Agentry mobile frameworks. Travel required up to 50% of time. Must live within normal commuting distance of worksite. May work from home up

to 3 days per week. Must be in oﬃce at least 2 days per week. Send resume via email to jobs@ havensightconsulting. com and reference code K040390 in subject line.

Accountant Nortia Logistics Inc. seeks an Accountant. Mail resume to 4136 United Parkway, Schiller Park IL

PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES

CLEANING SERVICES

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

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

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS PROFESSIONALS &

ISO Drummer for original project local w/ some out of town Original Project looking doe drummer, local & out of town shows, 1-4 monthly -no jobbers https://joerian.com

GOSSIP WOLF

DAMAGER PLAY ROCK ’n’ roll with meaty hooks and riffs as big as a cruise down I-94.

If this exuberant Chicago band reminds you of Japandroids—speciﬁcally their 2012 album Celebration Rock —well, that’s intentional. “I’ve been a huge fan of them for a really long time, and that album in particular was such a big moment for a younger me,” says Damager front man Dan Stewart. “Cloud Nothings, Titus Andronicus, Diarrhea Planet, and bands that were, like, this garage rock, classic-rock thing happening in the early 2010s became a huge inﬂuence on me.”

Stewart and his Damager bandmates drew upon Japandroids in particular while working on their new studio album, Forever or Else . This past summer, they decided to call the music they were making “celebration rock.”

“The next day I wake up to someone sending me a link to [Japandroids’] new single, and it’s called ‘Chicago,’” Stewart says. “I’m like, this is a cosmic joke, almost—it’s crazy.”

Stewart places Damager’s beginnings in January 2020, when he met bassist Garrison Krotz while visiting Chicago to check out DePaul’s graduate program in film and television directing. Stewart and Krotz had a lot in common: they’re both from Saint Louis, they both went to the University of Kansas for undergrad, and they love a lot of the same classic rock and 2010s indie rock. Stewart spent summer 2020 writing music and sending it to Krotz, and that fall he moved to Chicago. A year later, Stewart released Best Team in Baseball , an album he’d recorded on his own at home, using the name Damager.

Late in 2021, Krotz helped Stewart rework those ﬁrst Damager songs for a live band that also included drummer Adam White and guitarist Ryan Pollock . Damager gigged regularly at Gman Tavern, building camaraderie with other rock bands that played here. “Pinksqueeze, Calico Loco, OK Cool, Cut Your Losses, and Nora Marks—all these bands became really dear friends of ours,” Stewart says. “They inspired me and pushed me to pursue music more seriously.” Some of those acts appear in Stewart’s 2022 feature film Local Band , inspired by the city’s DIY scene. Stewart says Forever or Else draws upon his experiences as a single late twentysomething navigating Chicago and its bar culture. Of course, his time in the rock scene plays a big part too: “Friendship, brotherhood, and good times,” Stewart says. “That’s all kind of ensconced in the idea of ‘celebration rock.’” Damager play a release party for Forever or

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

Else at Beat Kitchen on Thursday, October 31. Modern Dairy and CalicoLoco open, and the music starts at 8 PM.

IN 1999, CHICAGO DESIGNER Chris Eichenseer launched Someoddpilot , a studio that built a reputation in local music on the way to big gigs with companies such as Saucony and Patagonia. Someoddpilot dabbled in album art and designed websites for Drag City and the Empty Bottle ; according to a 2015 Reader story by Andrea Bauer, it also created Pitchfork’s three-pronged logo. Someoddpilot also brieﬂy ran a record label,

ed people and that they should take the time to get to know them as well,” he says. Once every month for six years, he wrote a post about somebody he felt deserved a shot— video producers, clothing designers, mixologists, hairdressers, and more.

As the blog grew, Carter got busier, and he had a hard time maintaining it. He wanted to reimagine Raydiant Splendor while still honoring people doing great work in the community. He and his friends came up with the idea to transform the blog into an in-person awards ceremony. These days Raydiant Splendor is a nonprofit, and it hosts the third annual Raydiant Awards on Saturday, November 9, at the Woman’s Club of Evanston

issuing music by locals such as postrock group the Timeout Drawer and IDM misfit K-Rad . The label has been dormant for two decades, but Eichenseer reactivated it this year. The newest Someoddpilot release arrives Friday, November 1: an archival reissue of the 1989 debut album by Ariah, a teenage thrash-metal group from the Chicago suburbs in which Eichenseer played drums. The band originally made just 250 cassette copies of the album, then titled Damp Solitude Recession. For this sleek vinyl reissue, it’s been renamed Ariah IN 2016, WHEN WRITER and creative Rayvón Carter and his crew were struggling to break into their respective ﬁelds, he started a blog called Raydiant Splendor to highlight friends who inspired him. “I just wanted to let the world know that I knew talent-

“This whole award show is for ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things, and I want it to be a testament to anybody that you don’t have to have millions of followers to have impact,” Carter says. Five of the awards have an application process, so that members of the public can nominate themselves. A trophy and a $1,000 prize go to each winner in these categories: Rising Icon, for college freshman and sophomores; Yard Runner, for college juniors and seniors; Educator of the Year; Entrepreneur of the Year ; and Hometown Hero , introduced in 2023 to celebrate first responders and military personnel. Three nominees have been named in each category.

For the final award, there’s no application: Carter and the Raydiant Awards team choose the Maker honoree. “That is typically somebody who has exuded equity through creativity,” Carter explains. “How that comes to life depends on the person, but most of these people have been in their ﬁelds for at least 15 years, and they have a proven track record for living a life of service above self.” This year’s Maker honoree is Reggie Royal , pastor of Lifeline Church, where Carter is a member. Chicago’s favorite radio girl, Bree Speciﬁ c , hosts the awards ceremony. R&B singers Chanelle Tru and Rashida Briana perform live, and DJ LMS spins tunes throughout the night. Early-bird tickets have sold out, but general admission tickets remain available. —TYRA NICOLE TRICHE AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Fantasy could be reality

Getting a possibly vanilla boyfriend to open up; dating in new realms

By DAN SAVAGE

Q: I am a bisexual cis woman in my 40s. My boyfriend is a straight cis man in his 30s. I had limited experience prior to our relationship. That being said, it hasn’t stopped my boyfriend from providing all the pleasure I can imagine for the most part. There is just one thing I want to ask about. I am open about fantasies and o en think about sex even when we’re not “in the moment.” He says he doesn’t have any fantasies and doesn’t think about sex outside of the experience. How can I gently encourage my guy to have sexual fantasies? I suspect this is a mental block around shame and I think it would keep things interesting if we could both explore fantasy and talk more about it. Our NRE (new relationship energy) won’t last forever. —THE BIG REVEAL

a: As everyone knows, TBR, the average man thinks about sex every seven seconds. (Some consider that stat to be dubious—mostly because it’s been disproven again and again—but I’m going to trot it out one more time for sake of argument.) So either your BF, who only thinks about sex when he’s having it and claims to have no sexual fantasies, is an outlier (e.g., he thinks about sex far less than once every seven seconds) or he’s not being entirely honest with you about how o en he thinks about sex (and/or what he thinks about when he’s thinking about sex). Why wouldn’t a man share his (rate of) sexual thoughts and sexual fantasies with a girlfriend who wanted to hear about both?

He could worry his sexual fantasies might repulse you, TBR, and not because they’re repulsive—although they might be (some are!)—but because he may have shared his sexual fantasies with a previous partner who reacted badly. Once bitten, twice shy. I’ve lost count of the number of letters I’ve received from men and women whose partners begged them to open up about their fantasies and then reacted with horror at the revelation of a harmless, relatively common, and easily indulged sexual interest, like a thing for feet or fuzzy handcuffs. In a world where your run-of-the-mill foot fetishists and bondage for beginners types get dumped after laying their kink cards on the table, you’re going to encounter people who hesitate to share their sexual thoughts and fantasies with new partners for fear of getting dumped.

That said, it’s possible your boyfriend is one of those rare guys who is completely vanilla, TBR, and all of his sexual needs are being met in your relationship. (It’s also possible he doesn’t think about sex 19 times a day, which is the average for male college students.) So, why not err on the side of taking him at his word? You’re setting a good example for him by sharing your fantasies, TBR, and you can and should remind him once in a while—every few months or so—that you’re ready, willing, and able to return the favor if he has a sexual fantasy you can reasonably indulge. (“Reasonable” is a very subjective standard when it comes to kinks; one person’s “reasonable” sexual fantasy is another person’s “no fucking way.”) If

the world. I don’t know what I’m doing. Any advice? —BRANCHING OUT NOW

he hasn’t opened up to you about his fantasies because he’s struggling with shame— assuming, again, that he has any sexual fantasies—there’s no better cure than the affections and attentions a GGG (good, giving, and game) partner like you. But you’ll have to be patient.

As for keeping things interesting, TBR, just like it sometimes falls to one partner to initiate, it sometimes falls to one partner (not always the same partner) to keep things interesting once the NRE wears off. Which means you may be the one who has to order toys and/or suggest heading to a sex club or fucking on the roof when the time comes. So long as your GGG boyfriend is willing to go there with and for you, TBR, then it’s only a problem if you decide to make it one.

Q: I’m a 40-year-old cishet male, or at least I have been so far. I was in a very longterm relationship for most of my adult life, which ended just recently (partly because sex just wasn’t fulfilling for either of us anymore), and I find myself wanting different things out of sex nowadays. Specifically, I would like to try a more submissive role, and increasingly I don’t really care what gender the other person is. I’m learning that I’m quite attracted to twinks, femboys, and trans men, as well as women. I’m interested in exploring this attraction, but I have NO idea how to get back into the cishet dating/casual sex scene, much less the LGBTQ+ dating scene. I am excited but frankly terrified to put myself back out into

a: For better or worse, BON, most people (cishet or queer) meet their new sex and/or life partners online. So take some accurate pics, download some apps, and put yourself out there. And if you’re interested in meeting twinks, femboys, and trans men, you’re free to get onto hookup apps and dating websites that serve

the LGBTQ+ community. Remember: the “Q” in LGBTQ+ doesn’t just stand for “queer,” BON, it also stands for “questioning,” which is what it sound like you’ve been doing lately. You might get some grief from queer people who don’t want to be your experiment and don’t think anyone else should want to be your experiment either. So long as you’re respectful and honest about who you are and what you’re looking for, BON, you

aren’t violating anyone by getting on the apps. And trust me: there are twinks and femboys and trans men out there who are up for being a “straight” guy’s ﬁrst queer experience. When it comes to sex and dating, no one knows what they are doing until they do it a few times. Like everyone else who has ever used a dating or hookup app, BON, you’ll learn. But there’s no learning without doing. v m mailbox@savage.love