Chicago Reader print issue of November 7, 2024 (Vol. 54, No. 6) by Chicago Reader

THIS WEEK

06 Sula | Feature Lior’s Cafe is a safe space for Haitian food on the south side.

07 Reader Bites Basbousa milkshake at Ragadan

CITY LIFE

08 Street View Two style enthusiasts integrate bright color into their fall wardrobe.

COMMENTARY

09 Opinion David Mamet is the perfect mark for a con artist like Trump.

NEWS & POLITICS

10 Government A million-dollar workforce allocation study for the CPD

13 Housing Residents of an Uptown SRO fear displacement.

14 Incarceration A new report examines the hypercriminalization of gun possession in Black communities.

ARTS & CULTURE

15 Cardoza | Cover story Western Exhibitions’s founder Scott Speh reﬂects on the gallery’s ﬁrst 20 years.

18 Books Michael Soﬀer uncovers new details in the history of a former SS guard who lived for decades in Oak Park.

THEATER

19 Feature Anthony Spaulding’s solo show To Cut a Barber’s Hands captures his life a er incarceration.

20 Plays of Note Adverses retells the Electra myth; Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone at Second City e.t.c. has a sharp ensemble; Boy Gets Girl still disturbs.

FILM

22 Feature Black dreams are greater than hoops.

24 Moviegoer Psykho killer

24 Movies of Note Electric Body Movie impressively documents electronic body music as a genre; Heretic isn’t as clever as it thinks it is.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

25 Galil | Feature Defunct indie label Grandpa Bay planted seeds that are still sprouting.

28 The Secret History of Chicago Music Soulful singer Paulette McWilliams belongs at center stage.

30 Gossip Wolf Shoegaze prodigies Sunshy release their dazzling debut, and CHIRP hosts its ﬁnal Record Fair & Other Delights.

32 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Blood Club, Dr. Gabba, Extra Life, and India Ramey

CLASSIFIEDS

34 Jobs

34 Professionals & Services

BACK

35 Savage Love Should straight women go to gay bars?

ON THE COVER BUSTLE BY ARTIST EDIE FAKE (2024).

ORIGINAL IS ACRYLIC AND GOUACHE ON WOOD PANEL; 48 INCHES BY 48 INCHES.

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The Reader has updated the online version of Maureen Kelleher’s October 31 print article, “Do we really need to vote for school board candidates?” The previously printed version implied that Sendhil Revuluri created a candidate questionnaire for Chicago school board candidates by himself. He actually did so along with several other fellows from the Academy for Local Leadership. The Reader regrets the error. v

Top: The ﬁ lmmakers of Hoop Dreams (Frederick Marx, Steve James and Peter Gilbert) on set. Bottom: Arthur Agee in Hoop Dreams COURTESY KARTMEQUIN FILMS

John Akomfrah: Four Nocturnes is presented at Wrightwood 659 by Alphawood Exhibitions.

Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now is presented at Wrightwood 659 by Halsted A&A Foundation

 IMAGE CREDITS: (TOP) © John Akomfrah; Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. John Akomfrah: Four Nocturnes, 2019. Three channel HD colour video installation, 7.1 sound, 50 minutes. (AKOM190001).

FOOD & DRINK

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

Lior’s Cafe is a safe space for Haitian food on the south side

It’s traditional and new Creole cuisine at Washington Heights’s only ﬁne-dining restaurant.

By MIKE SULA

From under his feathered scarlet bicorn, Jean-Jacques Dessalines looks northward with deﬁance from Lior’s Cafe. The general, who kicked the French out of what they called Saint-Domingue in 1804, was joined on the restaurant’s exterior wall by other historic Haitians—including Chicagoan Number One, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable— when muralist Rahmaan Statik painted it for Lior’s opening a little over a year ago.

The vivid colors signal the presence of the only Haitian restaurant on the south side— one of only three in the entire city—and the only fine-dining option within miles of this car-swept block of South Halsted in Washington Heights.

Not pictured is Dessalines’s wife, Marie-

Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur Dessalines, the first Empress of Haiti, who is arguably just as important to Haitian national identity as her husband, and one whose most resonating cultural contribution simmers within.

“Most Haitians eat soup joumou on a Sunday,” says Chef Daniel Aurel. “Or they eat it on Haitian Independence Day. But we like to have soup joumou all year round, like every day.”

The key ingredient in soup joumou (aka pumpkin soup or Independence Soup) is squash, which enslaved Africans in Haiti cultivated for export by their colonizers—but were prohibited from eating themselves.

Marie-Claire is credited with establishing the tradition of eating soup joumou each Jan-

uary 1, when she distributed it to Haitians on their ﬁrst day of freedom with a delicious “Get manman ou!” (“fuck your mother”) to their once (and, sadly, future) oppressors.

At Lior’s Cafe, Aurel’s soup joumou is built on a vegetable stock with squash, cabbage, chayote, and penne and simmered with epis, the peppery, garlicky, herbal seasoning blend that lays the foundation for much of Haitian cuisine. You can get it with shrimp or a beef shank in your bowl, or order it vegan, the way Empress Marie-Claire probably ﬁrst made it.

Haitian food is a synthesis of Indigenous, African, and French influences, along with a little Spanish and Arabic, but sometimes Aurel goes o script.

Most of the traditional Haitian dishes at Li-

or’s Cafe start with his epis—a blend of green onion, red and green bell peppers, garlic, parsley, and thyme—which he learned to make from his Aunties Myelle and Tatie Nadine. It’s in the braised oxtails and the poule avec sauce, and the ﬁve-veggie legume stew, too. You can taste the epis in the occasional oxtail poutine special, but he doesn’t use it in his sweetand-spicy fried shrimp bombs or the boulette smashburger special he runs now and again.

“We are Haitian,” he says, “but I tried to do a little fusion too, because I didn’t want to shy people away.”

Aurel’s father, Jean Claude Aurel, a transit safety engineer who’d always dreamed of opening a restaurant, owns Lior’s Cafe, which he named for a goddaughter. In 2019,

(Clockwise from L) Poisson rouge with banan peze (fried plantains), sos pwa (rice and bean sauce), and accra (malanga fritters); Chef Daniel Aurel; diri djondjon (black mushroom rice) with pikliz (slaw) and banan peze MARTINE SÉVERIN FOR CHICAGO READER

5467

liorscafe.com

Haitian food is a synthesis of Indigenous, African, and French influences, along with a little Spanish and Arabic, but sometimes [Chef] Aurel goes off script.

he bought the shuttered corner store, along with two adjacent properties, and began gutting and building out a new restaurant from scratch. That was the same year his son, then 21, traveled to Haiti for the ﬁrst time, and for the ﬁrst time began to fully appreciate Haitian food through eating at Auntie Myelle’s Portau-Prince restaurant.

“My dad wanted to leave me in Haiti,” he says. “He wanted to leave me with my auntie and learn how to cook.” Instead, he went to culinary school in Kentucky and graduated with a job back home making sushi at Mariano’s. It was a temporary setback. “I knew down the line we would open up a restaurant.”

“The options around here are kind of slim,” says general manager Brandon Lenore, who got on board after working as the operations manager at Aurel’s engineering ﬁrm. “There are no barriers to entry into this space. As well as just having a Black-owned restaurant—people want to support their own in this community. There are a lot of single-family homes, older generation. They want to see a place like this. In regard to going out, they’re going to have to go to Hyde Park and the south suburbs. People want to stay in their own community.”

Bridgeport’s Brooke Lang Design handled the interior, bedecked by Haitian folk art that Aurel collected on his travels, while his son oversees the gleaming new kitchen, pushing out orders of crunchy malanga (taro root) fritters, and ﬂaky chicken or spinach pate (patties) on carved wooden plates.

Soup joumou is offered as a first-course option, as well as the aforementioned legume stew, and an almost gumbo-like bowl of bouillon, a stew thick with radish, carrots, spinach, watercress, and plantains.

There are some showstoppers among the second courses, like griot, epis-marinated, deep-fried chunks of pork shoulder; or poisson rouge, a whole red snapper smothered in a reduced tomato-garlic sauce; and one of the chef’s innovations, a jaw-dropping pot pie, its buttery crust breaking over braised-andpulled goat in a creamy mushroom sauce. Various rice sides, most notably one stained black by the dried mushrooms known as djondjon, along with mac and cheese, greens, or little pucks of corn sou e accompany these robust dishes, whose spell can be broken with

a side of pikliz, the tangy pickled cabbagecarrot-shallot slaw powered by habanero.

Lenore reckons that about 40 percent of their guests come from the neighborhood and 40 percent come from the city’s widespread Haitian community, including some from beyond: they’ve served Haitians from as far away as Florida and Louisiana. The remaining 20 percent, he says, are the food-obsessed, those willing to travel for new and rare culinary experiences.

Ironically, that’s a demographic that might have been bumped by recent events. Photos of Daniel Aurel cooking in the kitchen and Statik’s mural appeared in a September Tribune cover story after the MAGA cult’s supreme leader began lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets.

But as Dessalines and Du Sable watched from the wall, the response was supportive. “We’re glad to be insulated from that kind of hatred,” says Lenore. “But also we’re proud that we built such a positive environment that it doesn’t enter here. It’s kind of a safe space.” v

m msula@chicagoreader.com

MONDAY NIGHT

FOODBALL

In the empire of Middle Eastern pastry, baklava is revered as the Grand Sultana.

But my personal queen is the Egyptian basbousa, the spongy, syrup-soaked semolinacoconut cake whose sweet squishiness is balanced by a crunchy almond crown.

I feel the same way about the milkshake selection at Ragadan, Uptown’s beloved Jordanian Okie falafel–burger shop. Most folks are justifiably crazy for the top-selling baklava shake with salted caramel. But me? I’m mad for the basbousa shake.

FOOD & DRINK

pastries from Lincolnwood’s Libanais Restaurant, where a whisper of rosewater in the syrup perfumes the basbousa (aka harissa, aka namoura, depending on your origins).

But that delicate floral note is drowned out when the cake is crumbled into Ragadan’s creamy vanilla gelato, along with chewy chunks of candied orange and shards of almond brittle. It’s an opulent, ambrosial swirl of textures and temperatures that, when joined with one of Sweis’s Oklahoma onion burgers, is the consummation of fast food’s Cleopatra and Alexander the Great.

Owner Danny Sweis sources both

The Reader’s weekly chef pop-up series, now at Frank and Mary’s Tavern, 2905 N. Elston, Avondale

Follow the chefs, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.

—MIKE SULA RAGADAN 4409 N. Broadway, $8.95, 773-654-1788, ragadan.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.

Nov. 11 Big Easy gumbo by Dolin’ Out @dolin_out

Nov. 18 Rolling Polish with I Love Grill and Lemonade

Nov. 25 The all-Indigenous return of Ketapanen Kitchen @ketapanenkitchen

Dec. 2 The debut of Chef Jeremy Leven’s Spanish tavern Gilda @chefjeremyleven @gildachicago

Dec. 9 Smoke from the south with Dixie Dank BBQ @dixiedankbbq

Dec. 16 Revenge of Morgan Street Snacks @morganstreetsnacks

Dec. 23 Smoke from the east with Dhuaan BBQ Company @dhuaanbbq

Dec. 30 NYE-eve with Loud Mouth Kitchen @loudmouthchi

Head to chicagoreader.com/foodball for weekly menus and ordering info!

Basbousa milkshake at Ragadan

CITY LIFE

STREET VIEW

Many layers

Two Chicagoans preach leaning into personal style.

By ISA GIALLORENZO

“Fall is such an enjoyable season, but short. So many options open up in the fall . . . layers, accessories, and outdoor wear. It’s brilliant to be outside in the cool crisp air, but still warm and comfortable,” wrote Schuyler Smith, 48. Smith, a design director at the architecture and design firm Studio Gang, emailed me after I photographed him on the street this fall.

On that day, Smith gave cozy vibes while sporting a bright orange pair of clogs by Sven, a shoe brand based in Minnesota. His footwear paired beautifully with his striped thrifted tee, Levi’s Japanese denim jacket, and Carhartt work pants. Smith described his styling process that day as the usual, “Wake up, try to get kids fed and dressed, and try to get myself dressed in the ten minutes I have before someone needs something.”

Despite his obvious fashion proficiency, Smith agrees with an eight-year-old who once described his style as “circus.” “I think that is close to accurate,” Smith admitted.

For inspiration, Smith looks to the women and girls in his life, concentrating speciﬁcally on real life. “I really don’t follow any social media. In fact, my advice on that is, don’t,” he suggested. “When following trends in an algorithmic environment, it is nearly impossible to see something new, outside your bubble.” Smith advocates that people look to a wide range of humans to get style ideas.

“It’s incredibly important to ﬁnd out what you like, not what an algorithm says you are supposed to like,” Smith wrote. “Notice people in the physical world that are NOT of your gender, race, and age (but maybe have a similar body type).”

Speaking of body types, Jesse Fleming, 32, is a big fan of stylist David Kibbe’s body type system, established in his 1987 book David Kibbe’s Metamorphosis: Discover Your Image Identity and Dazzle as Only You Can , which she holds responsible for changing her whole style outlook.

“Dress for your personality and your body, not for trends. Finding your Kibbe body type and your color season is a great starting point and makes shopping for clothes much easier,” said Fleming. “Anyone can ﬁnd ways to look their best since personal style has no gender or size limitations, but your style speaks volumes before you even open your mouth—why not say something exciting?”

Fleming also encourages people to lean into what they already own, avoid fast fashion, and buy secondhand and sustainable clothing

whenever possible. “Ultimately this saves you money because it lasts longer, and you’re supporting small businesses and wage equality. Repair and rewear as much as you can,” she recommends. Fleming’s graphic printed coat by BCBGMAXAZRIA is one of her favorite pieces and only cost her $7 (purchased from online resale shop ThredUp).

A freelance editor and the lead singer for rock band She Rose from the Dead, Fleming says she works mostly from home and doesn’t need a special occasion to sport her favorite

looks. “I realized that if I waited for an occasion to put together a cute outﬁt, some clothes might never get worn again. Happily, that was not the case, but I still like to elevate everyday experiences,” she says. The day she was photographed, Fleming was making a humble Target run. “The right fall layers are really fun to break out year after year, and make me look forward to going out, even with the shortening days,” she adds. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Clockwise from top le : Jesse Fleming; Schuyler Smith; details on Fleming’s BCBGMAXAZRIA vintage coat; Smith’s well-loved Sven clogs

ISA GIALLORENZO

Mamet tells us how to vote

In a recent Chicago Tribune commentary, Hollywood writer and ex-Chicagoan David Mamet says Chicagoans don’t understand violence.

By JEFF NICHOLS

On October 20, the Chicago Tribune published an opinion piece by David Mamet entitled “This is why Chicago was once the marvel of our nation.” Despite the city’s incredible accomplishments in the arts, the sciences, and commerce, Mamet declares our “current marvel is not innovation and prosperity, but murder and crime.” Chicago, from Mamet’s perspective, has lost its ability to o er anything new to the world, other than images of violence.

Mamet begins his piece by claiming that his “small South Side neighborhood” gave the world Malcolm X, reporter Seymour Hersh, movie studio head Sherry Lansing, software giant Larry Ellison, and social critic Shelby Steele. “And the blues, the indigenous music that came up the Mississippi, remains the music of the world,” Mamet adds. Mamet subsequently lists o his picks of great Chicagoans, including B. Traven, a reclusive German adventure novelist with no record of ever living in Chicago. (There’s also no evidence Malcolm X lived in South Shore in his ﬂeeting time in Chicago, though Muhammad Ali and Michelle Obama did, albeit years after Mamet’s family had moved out.) All the individuals mentioned in Mamet’s op-ed have either died or have left the city.

Mamet squarely places the blame for Chicago’s decline on “machine politics,” a crisis which is both local and national. “Mayor Richard J. Daley silenced dissentient City Council members by turning off their microphones, and readers may finish the comparison to the legacy media,” Mamet claims. Those who remain in this dying city “can vote for a return to a deserved civic pride and common sense.”

As the screenwriter of the highly entertaining but historically fanciful movie The Untouchables, Mamet must be aware that Chicago has long had a worldwide reputation as a corrupt, crime-ridden city. It is possible that a person who has thought deeply about murder as a dramatic device in a play or movie knows more about the nature of crime than Chicagoans who have seen the aftermath of a child

bleeding out on the pavement during the crack epidemic. The numbers, however, show that crime in Chicago is not at a historical high.

With 617 homicides last year, the homicide rate in Chicago was 24.1 per 100,000 residents, according to one scholarly estimate. There were 970 homicides in 1974, the year Mamet’s hit play Sexual Perversity in Chicago premiered. In 1992, the homicide rate was an astounding 33.1 per 100,000. (Mamet had, by then, moved away from Chicago, o to stage Oleanna , one of his many works about how hard it is to be a man.) The idea that the period between the late 1960s to the mid ’90s were “safe” and “prosperous” years in Chicago, or, that the rise in crime in those years can entirely be linked to “Democratic machine politics,” is childish. Chicago artists, performers, and writers created amazing work during those difficult years, just as they had in the many decades that Chicago was known for violent strikes, unchecked epidemics, unbearable pollution, and ruinous economic downturns.

While many categories of crimes in Chicago are declining from a spike during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be fair for any conservative to point out that our defensive pride prevents Chicagoans from seeing what is happening in neighborhoods where violence is most heavily concentrated. We certainly have a bad track record of picking politicians tasked to solve our most critical problems. But just as Mamet depicts the nearly all-white neighborhood of his childhood as the cradle of the Chicago blues and the welcoming home of Malcolm X, he leaves his audience to imagine the incorruptible conservative alternative to

the source of our problems, past or present. Enraged by his critics on his left , Richard J. Daley frequently cut o debate time for Leon Despres, a ﬁercely independent alderman who gave Bernie Sanders his ﬁrst job in a political campaign.

Whatever Mamet’s problems with the “legacy media” of today, he should consider how Chicago newspapers of the past would have treated Donald Trump, a man Mamet regards as the greatest president since Lincoln. Chicago newspapers of the past, which fostered many of the writers Mamet reveres, didn’t give a voice to every political viewpoint. They did, however, make a blood sport out of covering amoral, inept businessmen. Mike Royko called Trump “the National Goo all” and “a wet-look loser.”

In an essay in Recessional: The Death of Free

genius. Mocking prisoners of war can thus be dismissed as an authentic expression of a brawling dealmaker with a big mouth, rather than a narcissist playing to the resentment of men who crave the level of deference reserved for decorated soldiers, the forbidden envy of men who have no time left in their lives to do anything that might be recognized as heroic.

In 2017, Trump said that a Chicago cop had told him how the crime problem in the city could be solved in only “a couple of days.” No one has found Trump’s cop, and the plan apparently involved locking people up without charge. Seven years later, Trump pledged to purge the federal civil service and the military of those not loyal to him. He has long threatened state-sanctioned violence against his perceived enemies. This is machine politics in its most extreme form. The notion that there is a vast conspiracy in the government and the press against Trump that can trace its roots to Chicago’s machine politics is a means to distract from the vast evidence that Trump isn’t the person his followers want him to be. Fabulists and frauds cannot save Chicago.

Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, a recent collection of essays that reflect his embrace of Trumpian conservatism, Mamet claims that the Left hates Trump in part because Trump refuses to speak in “hieratic language. He’s spent his life buying and selling politicians, negotiating with construction unions, bureaucrats, and The Boys.” Through their shared love of transgressive language, Mamet sees Trump not as a disordered degenerate whose cognitive abilities are slipping, but as a singular talent, a manifestation of American

If you are constantly pleading to the world that you are tough—because you grew up on the south side, because your father was a labor lawyer, because you played cards and pool in Chicago with rough guys, because you write plays with lots of swear words, because you have hung out with streetwise magicians, because you are proﬁcient in the martial arts, because you love guns, because you get criticized by liberals—you are only confessing your vulnerability. With his prodigious gifts of language, Mamet has an extraordinary ability to craft stories about self-delusion and hidden weaknesses. Ironically, he cannot see how he is the perfect mark for someone like Trump.

As for Chicago, we will persevere in this perpetually broken, beautiful city. There’s no hope to bicker with Mamet about the wealth of talent that stays here. As always, we shall continue to write and sing and build. The rest of the world can take it or leave it. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Rail rider out of Chicago, January 1943 JACK DELANO, COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

NEWS & POLITICS

GOVERNMENT

CPD’S $1 MILLION WORKFORCE STUDY

Is

transparency baked into the “hottest of hot potatoes?”

By DAVE GLOWACZ

This story was copublished by Inside Chicago Government and the Reader

The City of Chicago announced last week—via a meeting of its Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability—that it’s about to launch a thorough study of police sta ng, resulting in department-wide recommendations that will be shared publicly.

Details of the workforce allocation study, which could cost as much as $1 million, have yet to be widely disclosed by the city or the Chicago Police Department (CPD).

This e ort grew out of the federal lawsuit Illinois v. Chicago—a simple name that belies the profound impact it aims to have on CPD. The chilling antecedent was the 2014 murder of teenager Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. The shooting was captured on a police dashcam video, initially suppressed by the administration of then mayor Rahm Emanuel.

A year later, a Cook County judge ordered the release of the jarring video. It spurred a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation of CPD (and arguably scotched a third term for Emanuel).

In a 2017 report, the DOJ wrote that CPD had engaged in a longstanding, pervasive “pattern or practice” of civil rights abuses. Later that year, the Illinois attorney general and a coalition of community organizations ﬁled Illinois v. Chicago in federal court, asking the court to force reform on the department.

The suit resulted in the 2019 consent decree. This 230-page document dictates hundreds of reforms that CPD must implement under the supervision of a federal judge and continuous scrutiny by an independent monitoring team headed by former prosecutor Maggie Hickey,

and ﬁnanced by Chicago taxpayers.

Within the consent decree’s 600-plus paragraphs are a half-dozen dictates about how CPD deploys its workforce, including provisos that CPD must:

• Have plenty of mentoring cops (“field training o cers”) to coach rookies on the job.

• Set and keep a 1:10 ratio of ﬁeld supervisors (sergeants) to o cers.

• Not move supervisors around, so that o cers consistently have the same boss. (A rather tricky requisite: At an October consent decree hearing in a federal court, Assistant Attorney General Hannah Jurowicz said, “We have seen that supervisors have [moved] frequently based on seniority,” thanks to union contract provisions.)

• “Fully implement and maintain a sta ng model” that establishes supervisory limits and stability.

So, how well has CPD done on workforce requirements?

In her October 2021 semiannual report, chief monitor Hickey wrote that CPD’s “most notable obstacle for gaining compliance with” the consent decree’s workforce mandates “is the absence of a comprehensive staffing study.”

Now, fast-forward to October 30. At the city’s Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA) meeting that day, Commissioner Abierre Minor announced that “the workforce allocation study is almost ready for launch.”

At a CCPSA meeting on November 2, 2022, then chief of patrol Brian McDermott explained how his bureau reallocates the CPD workforce from day to day.

“Every single day my o ce does an analysis of where our emerging crime trends are, where we need the most of our deployments,” McDermott said. “We focus on our busiest districts.”

It’s not like they haven’t done this before.

Apparently, such practices continue to the present.

At a June 27 police district council meeting on the north side, a resident asked District Commander Melinda Linas how tactical—or plainclothes—o cers are allocated.

“A lot of our deployment of resources is based on data-driven analysis,” Linas replied. “It changes day-to-day, depending on what’s going on in the district, what events are

“Let’s just say,” McDermott continued, “the 12th District gets hot, or the 4th District, like it got hot this weekend. As soon as we’re starting to see an increase in shootings in the 4th District, I’m coordinating with my deputy chief, and we’re moving resources from other areas of the city to assist in those areas.”

August DNC protests JOSH DRUDING FOR CHICAGO READER

going on.

“If we have . . . robbery sprees . . . we would analyze that data and that of the surrounding districts,” she continued. “And we would kind of analyze where we think those sprees are going to happen . . . and we’d deploy to those [areas] based on the need, or the perceived need, based on the data.”

The sparkle of police data, however, fades in the piercing glare of the city’s Inspector General, Deborah Witzburg.

According to Witzburg, CPD can’t tell how many cops are working where, citywide, on

data is stored in too many different places,” Witzburg said. “That’s a problem for us from an oversight perspective. It’s a problem for the department from a management perspective.”

It’s also a problem for Chicago residents frustrated with a perceived lack of police response, and for activists who push for greater police accountability.

In 2011, for example, the Central Austin Neighborhood Association (CANA) sued CPD over its poor response to life-threatening emergencies in Black neighborhoods.

CANA, with attorneys of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois (ACLU), settled its suit with the city in 2021. The city agreed to improve its published records about 911 calls and police response times, and incorporate “equitable police response to calls for service into any new sta ng plan.”

That’s when CPD’s inadequate data came to the fore, according to Alexandra Block, director of the ACLU of Illinois’ Criminal Legal System and Policing Project.

“To see if the city is complying with the settlement in that case,” Block said, ACLU looked into “determining what would be equitable response times. And we [repeatedly] got the same answer from the city. They can’t tell us how many people are actually working on any day, on any shift in a given district, because they are not automating and keeping that data— which is just really stunning to me.”

ingly ignored and/or not widely released— both internal and external workforce studies, some identiﬁed in OIG’s July sta ng report. Examples:

• In 2010, an external study used “a workload approach to come up with the optimal number of officers” and found that CPD had a “disproportionality of patrol deployment.”

• In 2014, an external study recommended that CPD revamp the ratio of supervisors to subordinates, and better train supervisors.

• In 2018, an internal study proposed “a sta ng model which provides both ‘span of control’ and ‘unity of command’,” based on pilots in three police districts.

Why haven’t these studies been publicly considered?

As the author of the 2010 study, Alexander Weiss, wrote, reallocating officers is a “zero-sum game. . . . There will be winners and losers”—meaning that, in Chicago, any recommendation that reassigns o cers from one ward to another will face sti opposition by the losing wards’ representatives in the City Council. That makes such a study, said Hopkins, “the hottest of hot potatoes.”

“[T]HE POLICE DEPARTMENT’S DATA DOES NOT LEND ITSELF TO A GOOD AND CLEAR VIEW OF HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE WORKING AT ANY ONE TIME; THE DATA IS STORED IN TOO MANY DIFFERENT PLACES”

Block’s view was echoed by Second Ward alderperson Brian Hopkins. “Most of us don’t have a deﬁnitive number” of o cers working in particular wards’ police districts, Hopkins said in an interview. “And when we ask, we don’t get an answer.”

In 2020, 49th Ward alderperson Maria Hadden asked CPD for information about one of its external workforce studies. According to an email by then police superintendent David Brown, Hadden was told that the city’s law department wouldn’t let CPD disclose the study “because of attorney client and/or work product privilege.”

any given day.

While testifying at a September 26 joint meeting of the City Council’s committees on Public Safety and Police and Fire, Witzburg called CPD’s patrol sta ng data “incomplete and low in quality.” (Although patrol staff doesn’t include positions like detectives and internal a airs, it comprises over threefourths of department sta , according to the city’s 2024 budget ordinance.)

“[T]he police department’s data does not lend itself to a good and clear view of how many people are working at any one time; the

These concerns were corroborated in a July report by the city’s O ce of Inspector General (OIG). When CPD members are absent from work, the report said, “they are still captured in the data” as physically present. Also, CPD assigns some o cers to specialized units that work sporadically in each of the 22 police districts—“thus increasing the difficulty in measuring how their presence contributes to Department coverage in any speciﬁc location.”

In past years, CPD has undertaken—and seem-

This political and legal obstinacy was ﬁnally overcome by the requirements of the consent decree—such that, in January of 2023, CCPSA directed the police superintendent to “update the Commission on the progress of [a] comprehensive workforce allocation study” by June 1 of that year, with a further update by year’s end.

Documents obtained by the Reader and Inside Chicago Government showed that, soon after, CPD leaned in.

In October 2023, “CPD began collaborating with philanthropic groups to fund” a

NEWS & POLITICS

continued from p. 11

workforce allocation study, according to a June 3, 2024 memo by Chief of Staff Dana O’Malley.

Allyson Clark-Henson, a CPD managing deputy director, testiﬁed in an October 15 consent decree court hearing that the department “is expected to receive funding” of $800,000 to $1 million from four organizations: the Joyce Foundation, the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation, Arnold Ventures, and Chicago CRED. The funding, Clark-Henson said, “is being coordinated through the Commercial Club Foundation, a membership organization for philanthropic sectors.”

A source within the funder group, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, “We believe this study—and some of the related work—is crucial to our larger public safety strategy.”

Then, in December of 2023, 47th Ward alderperson Matt Martin introduced—and the City Council later approved—an ordinance obligating CPD to “enter into an agreement with a qualiﬁed third party to conduct a comprehensive sta ng analysis.”

In her June 3 memo to the mayor and City Council, CPD’s O’Malley reported that the department had chosen Matrix Consulting Group of San Mateo, California to conduct the study. On its website, Matrix says it’s conducted over 350 studies for law enforcement agencies in North America.

According to the court testimony of CPD’s Clark-Henson, Matrix will do the study in ﬁve phases. The ﬁrst phase will involve “initial interviews and stakeholder engagements,” and in the second phase Matrix will identify CPD’s current sta ng, organizational structure, and “allocation strategies.” The study will include every CPD employee, both sworn (i.e., badged) and civilian.

In the study’s third and fourth phases, Matrix will analyze CPD’s staing and develop “an interactive model that can be replicated as needed.” Matrix will address the consent decree’s requirements noted above, such as a 1:10 supervisor-to-officer ratio. It’ll also figure out where there aren’t enough people to do the work, and what sworn positions would better be done by civilians (an analysis also done by OIG in 2013).

What’s still unknown is how Matrix will determine CPD’s actual patrol presence in particular locations, which OIG has called “a complex, opaque, and imprecise exercise.”

Matrix must deliver ﬁnal workforce recommendations within 12 months after contracting to do the study.

“MOST OF US DON’T HAVE A DEFINITIVE NUMBER” OF OFFICERS WORKING IN PARTICULAR WARDS’ POLICE DISTRICTS, HOPKINS SAID IN AN INTERVIEW. “AND WHEN WE ASK, WE DON’T GET AN ANSWER.”

Normally, one could ﬁnd the city’s agreements with vendors, and related records such as requests for proposal, via the Department of Procurement Services (DPS) supplier portal. But because the city isn’t spending its own money on the CPD workforce study, the whole project is “handled outside of the DPS process,” according to a spokesperson.

That’s where the transparency challenge starts.

There are many things unclear about the workforce study project, because the city has yet to disclose key aspects. For example: How was the vendor chosen? How was the $1 million budget (give or take) ﬁgured? What’s the city’s legal agreement with the funders, and how might taxpayers be on the hook? Who, in what city department, is managing the project—especially now that Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed to cut the CPD office that manages consent decree reforms from 65 positions to 28?

The city has denied or ignored multiple requests for records and interviews that might provide answers.

And what’s in the vendor contract? The workforce study ordinance requires CPD to sign a contract with its study vendor within 90 days of the law’s approval. That date was May 22—a fact that Alderperson Martin, the

ordinance’s sponsor, said had him “incredibly concerned.”

“I’m frustrated. And I think, at this point, it’s embarrassing,” Martin said in an interview.

The ordinance also required CPD to report on the study’s progress—to the mayor and the entire City Council—three times between February and September of this year. CPD issued a single update on June 3, which it apparently sent to only one City Council member: Martin. Finally, in her October 15 court testimony, CPD’s Clark-Henson said that each of the project’s ﬁve phases “will include community engagement and status updates for both internal and external statements.”

Observers are ready to engage. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Editor's note: Despite multiple requests, the Chicago Police Department did not consent to interviews regarding this story.

August DNC protests JOSH DRUDING FOR CHICAGO READER

& POLITICS

HOUSING

Home truths

Residents of the Leland—one of Uptown’s few remaining aﬀordable housing options—fear they’ll be pushed out amid foreclosure proceedings that followed Heartland Housing’s collapse.

By DILPREET RAJU

Finding an apartment in Chicago is a difficult, stressful, time-consuming process—especially for low-income families and individuals. But, sometimes, keeping an apartment can be just as cumbersome.

The recent foreclosure of the Leland, a single-room occupancy (SRO) apartment building with almost 140 units in Uptown, has left residents and other community members scrambling to protect one of the few remaining affordable housing options in the neighborhood.

“I’m worried I’ll be homeless,” says one resident, Stephan, who asked only to be identiﬁed by his ﬁrst name to protect his privacy. “I’m on a limited income. This is perfect for me,” he tells the Reader of the room he’s been renting for almost a decade.

Single-room occupancy apartments like the Leland feature smaller, more a ordable units for low-income individuals, such as those relying on supplemental security income (SSI). Heartland Housing, a subsidiary of social services nonproﬁt Heartland Alliance, owned and operated the property until it was placed into receivership last year amid building code concerns and Heartland’s financial turmoil. The receiver, a court-appointed body, is tasked with managing the property in the time between owners.

In January, Mercy Loan Fund—a Denverbased nonproﬁt housing developer that claims to have preserved over 46,000 affordable housing units across the country—filed a foreclosure suit in the Circuit Court of Cook County against owners of the Leland. Mercy is now seeking the property to be sold by a Chicago foreclosure service.

Court records show that, in 2015, Mercy assumed control of a loan worth about $2 million that the building owners had taken out as part of a 2004 redevelopment. Mercy named a number of entities associated with the building in the lawsuit, including the City of Chicago and the Illinois Housing Development

Authority (IHDA) —both of which gave Heartland money to finance the 2004 redevelopment. Now, amid foreclosure hearings, residents of the Leland are concerned a for-profit developer may purchase the building and kick tenants out of the only place they can afford to live.

A ordable housing units are kept at rates that would allow people living on government income to rent them out, and developers of the buildings receive a tax credit for up to 30 years after ﬁnancing. Mercy, which owns or manages a number of properties in Illinois, noted in a September court filing that it and the City of Chicago had “met with and/ or discussed the preservation of the property with over 30 di erent potential new owners,” but because of “extreme needs at the property, none of these potential owners have been willing to take over the property.” City inspection records show a growing list of code violations for the building, mostly elevator-related. But residents of the Leland—which was

constructed 75 years ago—say it’s in OK condition. It’s similar to any other large apartment building you might ﬁnd in the neighborhood, with bricks that bare their history and stone spires atop a pair of the building’s corners.

Stephan says it’s maybe the only place he can afford in his neighborhood. “Uptown is getting gentriﬁed,” he says. “I just don’t want a for-proﬁt to come in and make apartments or condos.”

His concerns go beyond whether he will

have a place to stay. He says social workers employed by Heartland Alliance regularly visited the building to work with residents until the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Since then, those offices have been empty. “I’d go down there and talk about whatever bullshit,” he says. “It was really nice.”

Sue Gries, a housing team member with

community group One Northside, explained the situation bluntly during a July rally at the corner of Leland and Racine. “The Leland is in danger of being bought up by a for-proﬁt developer who will make more luxury microunits unless a nonprofit developer is able to put together the funding to keep this building affordable. That’s why we’re taking action.”

Gries said the Chicago Department of Housing and the IHDA, which uses public dollars to ﬁnance and maintain the state’s affordable housing stock, had “been supportive” by responding to the group’s inquiries but that those who are concerned “must keep up the pressure. We cannot a ord to lose a single unit of a ordable housing.”

Andrew Field, the IHDA’s deputy director of communications, relayed that a majority of former Heartland Housing properties have remained a ordable. “To date, ownership of 13 of the 14 properties have either been transferred or are in the process of being transferred to new owners who will maintain the affordability of the properties and not evict the tenants,” Field wrote in a statement to the Reader . “Regarding the Leland Apartments, all agencies continue to work with the owner to ensure the property stays open and a ordable for its residents.”

Lee Byrd, a tenant representative with the a ordable housing organization Voice of the People in Uptown, explained that more a ordable housing is needed in Chicago, not less.

“This is what you need and deserve in Uptown, in all communities: housing opportunities that never expire,” Byrd said, before asking the city and state “to commit the resources necessary to fund development without displacement.”

Jeff Martin, a Leland resident, survived a “massive stroke” in 2018 that caused him to lose his apartment and live in a nursing home until he found Heartland Alliance through his Medicaid provider. Heartland placed him at the Leland a few years ago.

“I consider myself at home in the building,” he says, lamenting how di cult it is to ﬁnd affordable housing. “A ordable units are in high demand and short supply, I already pay over half my income for rent.”

At a court hearing on October 28, he relayed the fears he and his neighbors share.

“Many of us have experienced homelessness, and the thought of facing that again is frightening,” Martin said. “Losing this building will only add to the homelessness crisis here in Uptown.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Residents of the Leland fear being displaced. ANNA WAGNER FOR CHICAGO READER

NEWS & POLITICS

The war on guns

Criminalizing gun possession fails to reduce violence and fuels mass incarceration in Black and Latino communities, a new report from Chicago Appleseed ﬁnds.

By MAIA MCDONALD

Anew analysis from the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts shows that criminalization of firearm possession increases incarceration and fails to reduce gun violence.

The report, Punishing Fear: The Devastating Impacts of the War on Gun Possession in Chicago, conﬁrms what many in marginalized groups have long argued—targeted and racialized policing of gun possession, strict gun laws, and increased investment in surveillance technologies, especially within the city’s Black and Brown communities, fail to address safety concerns and, instead, add to them.

“The criminalization of gun possession and the conflation of gun possession and gun use have made communities less safe by entangling more people in the criminal legal system,” the report states. “Time and time again, Black men, teenagers, and children are targeted, arrested, and criminalized for carrying guns that they feel are necessary for their own protection in areas with high rates of gun violence and low clearance rates by police.”

Naomi Johnson and Austin Segal—who produced the report along with Maya Simkin, Stephanie Agnew, Kareem Butler, and Briana Payton—from the nonproﬁt legal and advocacy organization showcased their ﬁndings at a virtual press conference on October 29. Also in attendance were Cook County Public Defender Sharone R. Mitchell Jr.; Martine Caverl, executive director of Black health collective and violence prevention organization Ujimaa Medics; and community stakeholders.

other sources.

They pointed to ﬁgures that illuminate the current state of gun ownership in Black communities, such as an Urban Institute survey of a nearly all-Black group of participants that found that more than 90 percent of male gun carriers in Chicago do so to protect themselves or others.

“People who possess guns without the proper licensure are often demonized in the media,” Johnson says. “However, many of these people are themselves survivors of gun violence who are taking measures to protect themselves and their families from violence. We believe it is critical to center their voices in this conversation.”

Chicago Appleseed researchers highlighted several topics featured in their report during Tuesday’s press conference—including the hypercriminalization of guns and the subsequent “war on guns,” akin to the historic “war on drugs” that similarly impacted a disproportionate number of Black communities throughout the country.

They also discussed the reality of those living in marginalized communities, who often acquire guns due to safety concerns.

“The criminalization of gun possession and the conflation of gun possession and gun use have made communities less safe by entangling more people in the criminal legal system.”

Researchers worked on the report for more than a year, using public investigatory, arrest, and prosecution data and crime reporting from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s O ce, the Chicago Police Department (CPD), and

actually addressing the risks and realities that informed their decision to possess a gun in the ﬁrst place,” they say.

Gun licensure laws in Illinois are among the strictest in the country and have only grown more extreme over time. Black communities in particular face the biggest barriers to navigating legal avenues to gun ownership. Additionally, law enforcement calling for stricter gun laws and expanded policing have also racialized and targeted Chicago’s majority-Black areas, the report concludes.

rying firearms in neighborhoods—where the practice is common and many feel like relying on law enforcement isn’t an option—should be seen as a “rational, adaptive strategy.”

Cole cautions against insisting that youth relinquish their guns to access resources and support. He says this creates a barrier to engagement and deepens already existing marginalization.

Harsh gun laws have proved ine ective at addressing the underlying causes of violence such as segregation and poverty, accessibility to guns, and feelings of insecurity in Black and Latine communities in the city’s south and west sides. This further destabilizes communities, Johnson says.

Mass incarceration grows when there are limited opportunities for dismissal, deflection, or diversion in gun possession cases. Many guilty sentences result in three years of incarceration, Segal says. “This strategy creates a class of people—who can never legally possess a ﬁrearm in Illinois—without

“This report, while di cult, tells truths and, while complex and well-researched, mirrors the stories and opinions I’ve heard, and we’ve heard, in our communities,” Mitchell Jr. says.

“We have a serious problem when it comes to the e ectiveness of law enforcement responses to gun violence.”

Chicago Appleseed believes communitybased harm-reduction practices that center communities of color and those impacted by gun violence can help address the criminalization of both gun possession and Black and Latino communities in Chicago. But it will be up to the city and state lawmakers to implement these.

Recognizing that many marginalized youth of color risk incarceration for illegal gun possession to keep themselves and their families safe and responding to their needs with the proper tools is also important.

For Malik Cole of local ﬁrearm harm reduction organization Stick Talk, youth of color car-

To address gun violence in Chicago and create a system of equitable gun possession, we should divest from carceral strategies and instead use harm-reduction practices, a compassionate and evidence-based public health framework that seeks to meet people where they’re at, and strategies that minimize health and safety risks, “even if [people] aren’t interested in stopping those behaviors,” Cole believes.

Additionally, community-based nonviolence organizations like Stick Talk, Ujimaa Medics, GoodKidsMadCity, and others that interact directly with the people most impacted by gun violence need to see increased investment, the report concludes.

“We believe that if properly supported, carefully scaled, and given the time to ﬂourish, firearm harm reduction will reduce gun violence and improve community safety more e ectively than the criminalization of ﬁrearm possession and abstinence-based approaches,” Cole says. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Data analysis by Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

R“20 YEARS OF WESTERN EXHIBITIONS”

Through 12/21: Tue–Sat 11 AM– 6 PM, Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago, westernexhibitions.com/exhibition/20-years-of-western-exhibitions

ANNIVERSARY

The past and future of Western Exhibitions

ARTS & CULTURE

Scott Speh found longevity in the art world by supporting artists and honing his own singular vision.

By KERRY CARDOZA

Running a commercial art gallery these days is no easy feat, perhaps especially in Chicago. Recent years have seen the closure of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Carrie Secrist Gallery (though the gallerist relaunched earlier this year as SECRIST | BEACH), Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Galerie F, and Shane Campbell Gallery, among others. Just this month, Rhona Hoffman announced she’ll be closing her gallery’s doors next year, after nearly 50 years in the business. So it is quite the accomplishment that Western Exhibitions, a commercial gallery that started out as a nomadic curatorial endeavor, is celebrating its 20th anniversary as a physical space with “20 Years of Western Exhibitions.” The show is a journey through the gallery’s history, featuring archival materials—including artists’ work hung salon-style in the o ce space and the owner’s to-do journals.

Western Exhibitions’s longevity is even more impressive when you consider that gallery founder Scott Speh launched with no formal training in curation, business, or arts administration. “When I figured I wanted to run a gallery, I didn’t have a necessarily concrete vision,” Speh says. What he had was an eye for what he liked—about an artist’s work or an exhibition’s design.

Stan Shellabarger and Dutes Miller are two of the artists that Speh has worked with the longest; both had work in Western Exhibition’s first show in a proper gallery, “This Thing We Do,” in 2004.

The artists—who make work together as Miller & Shellabarger while also maintaining their own practices—agree that Speh has always been intentional with Western Exhibitions, from the artists he works with to the direction he wants the gallery to go.

like, I don’t want to make—I want to go talk to people, see what my friends are doing in their studios.”

So in 2002, he decided to start curating exhibitions on a nomadic, sporadic basis while maintaining his day job. His ﬁrst show was in his apartment, where he featured “earnest paintings on unearnest materials” by artist Pedro Vélez: tiny paintings on the

for them. And I think that’s still what he wants to do. I see him doing it all the time. Growing the business and the look and the reputation of the gallery over the years has given him a better platform for doing what he wants to do,” Miller says.

“Chicago would be a far less interesting art city if Scott wasn’t doing what he was doing.”

“He’s always supported artists who have their distinct point of view, he’s always supported queer artists, he’s always supported women artists—and he wants to make careers

Speh dipped his toe into curation in the late 90s after graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with his MFA. He stayed in Madison for a few extra years, writing art criticism, curating, and continuing his art practice, which he says was mainly printmaking and painting. He got a job recruiting undergraduates for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which took him to NYC. While living there on a meager

salary was tough, he spent his days o visiting galleries.

“I would go to Chelsea, and I’d start at White Columns and just work my way up to, like, 28th Street, where the last gallery was. It’d be like ﬁve, six straight hours of art looking,” he says. He was also curating some shows and writing criticism with the artist-run space 16 Beaver. “So it was like translating what I was seeing on these marathon days,” he says. “I didn’t think about it, but I was really training my eye of what I like to see in a show, and how are shows put together.”

In 2001, Speh moved to Chicago to take a full-time admissions role at SAIC—recently divorced, bored with his art practice, and a bit wearied from his time in New York. He was ready for something new. “At the end of 2001, when I’d get o the road, I didn’t want to go back into the studio,” he says. “I was

end of drywall screws, a rainbow on a piece of found wood. Even this early show evinced some of Speh’s enduring interests. “I’m not that interested in craft, but I’m interested in if something’s crafted interestingly,” he says. He’s also drawn to work that shows the hand. “I love the immediacy of seeing someone’s process that’s right there on the paper. And so even when I’m showing work that might be more conceptually minded, I still want there to be a handmade element to it.”

For a few years, Speh continued putting on shows around town at other galleries, or in lofts or apartments. In 2004, he opened his first proper gallery location in a shared loft with gallerist Lisa Boyle, at 1648 W. Kinzie. In 2008, Speh struck out on his own with a new space in the West Loop, then the center of the city’s art district. That year, Speh also left his day job, committing to running the gallery

Scott Speh with artists Deb Sokolow, Dutes Miller, Geoﬀ rey Todd Smith, and Aya Nakamura JOSH DRUDING FOR CHICAGO READER

ARTS & CULTURE

continued from p. 15

full time, though the timing would prove inopportune, coinciding as it did with the Great Recession.

Somehow, the gallery persevered, helped no doubt by Speh’s meticulous organization and management. Throughout the gallery’s tenure, it’s either been run solely by Speh or with the help of one other person.

In 2016, after a handful of other moves, Western Exhibitions moved to its current location, on the second ﬂoor of 1709 W. Chicago, along with Document, Volume Gallery, and Paris London Hong Kong. The galleries had been renting in the former Checker Taxi Association building in the West Loop until the landlords decided to court larger companies. Google had recently opened an office in the neighborhood, Speh explains, “and every landlord thought they were sitting on a tech incubator.”

The West Town space was wide open (it had been a former CrossFit-style gym) and ripe for reenvisioning. The galleries invited David Salkin, an architect who runs a design studio, to join them on the second ﬂoor. “Then everybody followed us over here,” Speh jokes, as West Town is now a central location for art galleries, many having been priced out of the West Loop.

Whited was installed in Gallery Two. Whited is a studio resident at Cincinnati nonprofit Visionaries + Voices, which provides support and services for artists with disabilities. It’s the latest show in a series of partnerships Speh has forged with Visionaries + Voices and similar organizations, including Chicago’s

Shellabarger agrees. “He doesn’t come and dictate what the show will be. You actually sort of present what you’d like to show to him, and he’s very generous in that he doesn’t necessarily just say no to anything, but he’ll deﬁnitely give his opinion.”

The occasional group shows, such as 2023’s drawing biennial, are idea-driven. “But it’s not my idea, generally,” Speh says. Instead, he’s drawn to themes he sees multiple artists pursuing, like patterns. “I’ve always gravitated to this idea that there’s not any original ideas. There’s just multiple takes on a theme,” he says.

The 2017 show “A Sag, Harbored,” for example, centered around the “concept of a fabric sagging in the middle between two upraised points.”

Over the years, a few natural themes have

eventually created a separate entity for artist books and multiples at varying price points, WesternXeditions, to which a section of the gallery is devoted.

“It’s been following artist leads,” Speh says of the gallery’s focus. “I realized when I ﬁrst started, I was showing way too many men,” so he eventually made a conscious effort to achieve greater gender parity. “The artists that we started showing who are women or women-presenting had a very strong feminist element. So that became another prevailing theme.” The same thing emerged via the queer artists on the roster. “I’ve learned so much as a straight white jock from the midwest, which is what I was in high school,” he says. “I work with people who have opened up my parameters, opened up my horizons, to a whole di erent way of thinking and living and existing. So that’s been a real beneﬁt of doing this.”

FAll ﬁve spaces remain at the address, largely sharing exhibition opening days, which draw a lively crowd. Western Exhibitions has the largest gallery space among them, with a sizable Gallery One, which typically hosts group shows or solo exhibitions by artists on the gallery’s roster, and a smaller Gallery Two, which allows Speh “an opportunity to take a chance on new people.”

In January 2022, Gallery Two opened a show by the Japan-born, Chicago-based artist Aya Nakamura—painterly abstract drawings on paper with muted, almost patchwork compositions. Speh discovered Nakamura’s work in an online “art fair” during the height of the pandemic lockdown. He reached out for a masked-up studio visit and invited her to show her work shortly thereafter. Nakamura— who received her MFA from SAIC in 2013—describes the whole process as “seamless.” Just a few months after the exhibition, she formally joined the gallery’s roster.

This fall, an exhibition by artist Cathrine

Arts of Life and Project Onward, and Brooklyn’s LAND. Whited’s show, titled “Great!,” consisted of precise pencil drawings of the furniture in her bedroom and a scene of a sleepover at a friend’s house, alongside images inspired by Chuck E. Cheese.

When it comes to curating his artists’ solo presentations, which typically take place every three years, Speh doesn’t have a heavy hand. “He always makes sure to give me lots of space and time to create my own work,” Nakamura says. “There’s a level of freedom that I really appreciate.”

“It is a partnership,” Speh says of his relationships with his artists. “And I think any good gallery–artist relationship should be.”

“Scott’s pretty generous and trusting with his artists,” Miller says. “He basically asks what you’re interested in doing. . . . He is very supportive, and just really interested in his artists’ ideas and their work.”

emerged from the gallery’s exhibitions. While Western Exhibitions is more of a traditional gallery, in that it shows work across media, there is an emphasis on works of paper; LGBTQ+ and feminist artists; artists who create their own worlds; and artist books. Speh

or Western Exhibitions’s artists, working with the gallery has been careerchanging. “I’d easily say it’s made our careers,” Miller says. “Yeah, I don’t know that anyone would know about my work or our work if Scott hadn’t been showing it,” Shellabarger adds. Over the course of Miller and Shellabarger’s careers, much of which has overlapped with their time at the gallery, their work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Canada; they’ve shown, individually or together, at the MCA, Hyde Park Art Center, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among many other institutions. Western Exhibitions aims to be a full-service gallery: Speh not only shows his artists’ work and handles sales, he takes it to art fairs, works to get it into museums and other collections, promotes other exhibitions the artists might be having, and assists with contracts and logistics like shipping. More than once, I’ve heard him referred to as an unusually ethical gallerist. “It is a partnership,” Speh says of his relationships with his artists. “And I think any good gallery–artist relationship should be—both parties should think it’s a partnership where you’re working together towards common goals. Yes, it’s about sales, but it’s not all about sales. It’s about ideas and finding ways to present your ideas in a thought-provoking, cogent manner.”

Miller values Speh’s commitment to work-

ARTS & CULTURE

“It could go on another 20 years, or it could stop pretty fast.”

ing with artists he is drawn to. “Showing the artists that he shows has not always been a commercial decision,” he says. “Really giving space for artists that he believes in to have room to exhibit and to show their work is not what commercial galleries are necessarily about, and Scott’s about that.”

Yet for all Speh’s e ort, due to the current art market slump, he says “the future of the gallery is in ﬂux.” An outpost in Skokie, which opened in 2022, will likely close after its current exhibition, a gorgeous Elijah Burgher solo show featuring drawings, prints, and massive unstretched paintings of sigils, abstracted symbols meant to hold mystical powers.

“The belt-tightening is happening everywhere,” Speh says. He ﬁnds that, at art fairs, there are fewer collectors and fewer institu-

A Guide to the Moon

To those who wish to chase the silver sliver in the sky I gift to you a guide. Turn the corner at the cotton trees, Bring your bags and wave goodbye.

Pack warm socks and short stories, Leave behind the words you never said.

Walk up the marble staircase

With metal shoes glued to your feet, At the top, you must wait to board a train While the clouds turn blue to pink. Please exit at the second stop, Here the trees are extra small, Then take the rightmost road.

At the end of quite a sandy path

You’ll see a canyon and you’ll scream, I wish to party with the moon.

A year may pass before she comes but she’ll still greet you with a grin. No teeth will show, her eyes hollow, demand a dance or two.

When you perform your practiced prance she’ll giggle to herself

Then lean in close and say,

No, I don’t drink and I don’t play, I do not have a middle name.

Please return to earth to ﬁnd yourself and come a diﬀerent day.

The moon will point you to a back staircase, Push your bags straight down that slide.

And oﬀ you’ll go, the moon will not accept your waves.

Sleep well that night and still look up

At that silver sliver in the sky, You cannot have a guide, my friend, that leads you to another being.

Ignore the future and hug yourself, then maybe we can meet again.

By Avery Zieper

tions sending curators. And the younger generation seems less interested in collecting art.

“It could go on another 20 years, or it could stop pretty fast,” he says of the gallery.

If Western Exhibitions were to close, the Chicago art scene would undoubtedly suffer for it. Some of the most thrilling shows I’ve seen in the past decade were through Speh’s doors, from the immersive photo installation of Jessica Labatte to the swirling dreamscapes (or hellscapes, as with her obsessive drawings of Lindsey Graham) of Ruby T to the anthropomorphic carpet collages of Jessica Campbell.

As Shellabarger puts it, “Chicago would be a far less interesting art city if Scott wasn’t doing what he was doing.” v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

Avery, originally from Littleton, Colorado, now lives and works in Chicago. Having studied philosophy and poetry in undergrad at Northwestern University, she enjoys mixing and exploring the two subjects in her writing.

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

Fugitive/Refuge

Join us for a poetry reading featuring Philip Metres and Faisal Mohyuddin. November 9, 2024 at 2 PM

A Library of Light

Join us for a poetry reading featuring Danielle Vogel, fahima ife, and Stefania Gomez. November 16, 2024 at 2 PM

The anniversary exhibition includes Speh’s to-do journals.

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

ARTS & CULTURE

BOOKS

A Nazi in Oak Park

A new book delves deep into the SS guard turned custodian who divided the suburb.

By EMILY MCCLANATHAN

What happens when a suburb that prides itself on inclusivity discovers a former Nazi in its midst?

Forty years ago in Oak Park, Illinois, this question was not hypothetical. In December 1982, news broke that Reinhold Kulle, the 61-year-old chief custodian at Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF), had been an SS guard at a concentration camp during World War II. In Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter With Evil , local teacher and debut author Michael Soffer examines the fallout of this shocking revelation and the ugly rifts it exposed in the community.

“This book started as a lesson plan,” writes So er, who now teaches history at Lake Forest High School. In 2020, then a history teacher at OPRF, Soffer developed a Holocaust studies elective course “in response to a slew of antisemitic hate crimes on the high school’s campus.” Discussing primary sources about the nearly forgotten Kulle a air with his students spurred him on to further research. In the resulting book, Soffer relies on archival sources and his own extensive interviews to craft a compelling nonfiction narrative encompassing Holocaust history, the ﬂight of former Nazis to the U.S., the tenacious e orts of those who tracked them down, and issues of historical memory and justice.

Several chapters trace the early life of Kulle, who was born in 1921 in Breslau, Germany (now

Wrocław, Poland), joined the Hitler Youth in 1936, and enlisted in the Nazi paramilitary unit known as the SS (Schutzsta el) in 1940. After getting injured during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he was assigned to guard duty at Gross-Rosen, a slave labor camp in his native region of Silesia. During his two and a half years at the brutal camp, Kulle was promoted twice and got married—to Gertrud Fichtner, a local woman from a loyal Nazi family.

So how did a decorated SS veteran eventually make his home in the western suburbs of Chicago, raise a family there, and work for 25 years at a prominent local high school?

More easily than one might think. In 1948, President Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, which allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to resettle in the U.S. over the next four years. The new law prioritized ethnic Germans and Slavs, excluding many Jewish survivors; even Truman called it “ﬂagrantly discriminatory.”

“Former Nazis knew how to appear like every other potential immigrant,” Soffer writes. With just a few omissions on their immigration forms and convincing lies in their interviews, men like Kulle could successfully pass through the system. In 1957, he did just that, moving to the Chicago area with his wife and two children. Until his dark past was revealed in 1982, he lived a quiet domestic life and built a reputation as a hardworking, helpful employee.

Soffer situates these events in Oak Park’s history as a community that developed from the conservative hometown of Ernest Hemingway into a “national model for integration” that was recognized as the National Civic League’s “All-America City” in 1976. He complicates this narrative of progress by noting the slow pace of integration and the lingering e ects of racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism.

The book also recounts the uneven trajectory of “Nazi hunting,” both in the U.S. and abroad, in the decades after World War II. Initially a priority of the Allies, these e orts slowed in the 1950s as Cold War tensions es-

calated. In later decades, the pursuit of justice was taken up again by people such as Holocaust survivors Tuviah Friedman and Simon Wiesenthal, U.S. representative Elizabeth Holtzman, and, eventually, lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department’s O ce of Special Investigations.

This was the context in which Kulle was charged with the deportable offenses of committing fraud on his visa application and participating in persecution as a concentration camp guard. His subsequent trial, the school board’s prolonged deliberations over his employment status, and the intensely polarized responses of community members make up the bulk of Our Nazi

One of the book’s most shocking themes is Soffer’s documentation of the many colleagues and local residents who came to Kulle’s defense. Some appealed to forgiveness in light of his long service to the school, while others spouted blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric. Jewish community members and their allies urged the board to ﬁre Kulle regardless of the outcome of his trial. Leah Marcus had the unenviable position of being the lone Jewish school board member.

Soffer quotes extensively from primary sources and interviews with firsthand participants from the period. While he clearly has an authorial perspective (in the acknowledgments, he calls Eli Rosenbaum, one of the prosecutors in Kulle’s trial, his hero), Soffer opens a window into the psyche of Kulle’s defenders, encouraging the reader to ponder complex questions of complicity and justice. Historical memory—both of the Holocaust and of the Kulle a air—is another key theme:

So er notes the lack of Holocaust education in the U.S. during the early decades after the war, as well as its waning in recent years. As for Kulle’s trial, this deeply divisive episode was practically memory-holed for almost three decades. In 2012, Oak Park eighth-grader Drew Johnson revived interest in the topic with her thoroughly researched history fair project, but it wasn’t until 2021 that the school board voted to unseal the minutes from the closed executive session in 1984 that determined Kulle’s future with the school. Due to this collective amnesia, the book’s ending feels somewhat incomplete. The author can’t make up for the historical lack of closure, but that’s what makes Our Nazi an essential work. Through his own reporting and access to previously unavailable sources, So er uncovers a fascinating local story with national implications for how we remember the past and deal with its painful resonances in the present. v

Author Michael Soﬀer LEAH GRABER PHOTOGRAPHY

TO CUT A BARBER’S HANDS

Presented as part of the 28th annual Fillet of Solo Festival, Sat 11/9 8: 30 PM and Sun 11/ 17 5: 30 PM; Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, lifelinetheatre.com, $12 ($ 60 for festival pass)

To Cut a Barber’s Hands tells a story of life after prison

“I

get to the board and they’re telling me, ‘Well, we gotta protect

the public from you.’”

By CHARLIE KOLODZIEJ

“I

have to make this play as a way to throw it back in their face,” says actor and playwright Anthony Spaulding. He’s talking about his new one-man play To Cut a Barber’s Hands, which follows Spaulding’s real-life journey to obtain a barber’s license, something seemingly simple if it were not for his criminal record. At the time of his release from prison in 2022, Spaulding had just finished a 27-year sentence, having entered the system when he was just 16.

Spaulding is all energy when he’s talking, a poet at heart—you get the sense his mouth can’t keep pace with the ideas in his head. “They need to really see how outrageous it is for a person like me to come home.”

Told through poetry, singing, dancing, rapping, comedy, acting, and storytelling (the phrase “Renaissance man” undersells his talents), the play chronicles the state-imposed hoops Spaulding was forced to jump through postrelease. At a time when all he wanted to do was provide for himself and his family, “they cut o my hands,” says Spaulding.

Spaulding began cutting hair while still incarcerated, learning the craft as part of a life skills program. He liked the art that went into the process, and he liked seeing the way a new haircut made people feel. After his release, he took classes at Legacy Barber College in Rogers Park, eventually moonlighting as an instructor a few days a week.

The only thing standing in the way of Spaulding obtaining his license and cutting hair full-time was the Illinois statute on licensing. The law (225 ILCS 410) requires applicants to have 1,500 hours of experience, score at least 76 percent on the Illinois barber board exam, and be at least 16 years of age. Check, check, check, in Spaulding’s case. Nowhere in the requirements, he points out, does it say anything about being formerly incarcerated as an insurmountable barrier to obtaining a license.

Still, the licensing board turned down his application. “I got thousands of hours of experience in the community, working service certiﬁcates, this, that, and the third. I get to the board and they’re telling me, ‘Well, we gotta protect the public from you.’”

The play recounts the informal trial the licensing board conducted to determine Spaulding’s eligibility. “They put me through a lot of questions and stu that I shouldn’t even have to answer,” he says. It was an experience that mirrored his legal trials. Using a mix of rap and what he calls his “Shakespearean mode”—all verbosity and iambic pentameter—Spaulding combines the two trials into a sort of soliloquy on the agony of the board’s refusal. He throws in a lot of barber terminology too, something you may only catch if you’re familiar with the craft. Spaulding’s winking at the real barbers in the room, he says.

Dispersed over the play’s hour-long runtime are stories from Spaulding’s adventures in barbering. In one vignette, he recounts a conversation he had while giving a haircut to an unhoused man about their respective life paths. In another, he talks about giving advice to a young teen who came into his shop and who reminded Spaulding of himself pre-incarceration. These moments underscore the role of the barbershop in Black communities, says Spaulding. More than just a place to get a quick lineup, it’s also where you can hear the latest gossip, de-stress, and leave with your conﬁdence lifted.

Spaulding began writing plays while still incarcerated, receiving mentorship from the late artist and activist Margaret T. Burroughs, founder of Chicago’s DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center. Burroughs led creative writing classes at Stateville, where Spaulding served most of his sentence. She would have her students write and perform spoken word poetry for their peers, an experience Spaulding says helped develop his

confidence onstage. (Although in talking to Spaulding, it’s hard to imagine him as anything but conﬁdent.)

Burroughs’s mentorship inspired Spaulding to pursue theater postrelease, eventually landing in the InterGens program at the Goodman Theatre, a project that brings together di erent generations of actors and playwrights to create community-driven ensemble theater. There Spaulding met another friend and mentor, longtime Chicago theater staple Willa Taylor, who encouraged him to write about his career as a barber and his life after prison.

Spaulding debuted To Cut a Barber’s Hands in December 2023 at Rooted Community Church in Rogers Park. Since then he has been performing the piece wherever he can find a stage, from churches to retirement homes to schools.

One day he went over to Second City and asked them, “What does it take to get your show produced here?” “This is a comedy place,” they told him, initially turning him down. But Spaulding believed in his art and the story he was telling and sent in a short reel. A few weeks later, Second City got back

THEATER

to him with dates for his upcoming show. “Everybody that was in the community was like, ‘Oh man, I can’t believe they let you in! I’ve been trying to get in for years,’” says Spaulding. He played two shows this past July at the venue’s Blackout Cabaret.

Spaulding does, in fact, have his barber’s license. You can stop by for a fresh cut most days at State Street Barbers on North Wells. However, the trials he had to go through to get it, both literal and metaphorical, are emblematic of a larger problem with the way our society treats returning citizens. People with criminal records often face the “collateral consequences of incarceration,” de jure and de facto barriers to future employment and housing. Some of these consequences are at the state level: formerly incarcerated folks in Illinois are often barred from working with vulnerable populations, such as the elderly or children. Others, as in Spaulding’s case with the licensing board, are seemingly left to the whims of people in positions of power.

According to the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, clearing someone’s criminal record—meaning that it is no longer available for public view— allows for a 20 percent wage increase for that individual within a year. (If you want to support work in the records clearance space, check out Clean Slate Illinois, a statewide coalition of groups looking to pass an initiative that would automate the expungement and sealing of criminal records.)

When you deny someone the opportunity to be economically self-su cient, you’re not just hurting them, says Spaulding—you’re hurting yourself. “These people are going to be your neighbors. These people are going to be you. I’d rather have a guy [in the community] with an opportunity that can work and provide for himself.”

“When somebody expresses to you today, ‘I’m trying to do something positive.’ . . . You should be trying to say, ‘Well, how can I help you with that? How can I get you in a better space where you can be successful and ﬂourish?’” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Anthony Spaulding performing at the Chicago Math and Science Academy on March 4, 2024 COURTESY ANTHONY SPAULDING

THEATER

OPENING

RMother-daughter death match

Adverses reimagines the story of Electra Rey Andújar’s Adverses ﬁrst played at Aguijón Theater in May 2016. I missed that production, but seeing it as part of the seventh Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival on the eve of Día de Muertos and the cusp of the terror-inducing national election gave it a special ﬂavor of tension, dark humor, and painful revelation. Andújar’s play, codirected by Marcela Muñoz and Sándor Menéndez, is all about death, deception, vengeance, and the abuse of power, rendered here through a contemporary spin on the story of Electra, the vengeful daughter of King Agamemnon, and her scheming mother, Clytemnestra (here called “Clitemnestra”).

The latter, played by Kris Tori with a cunning combination of glamor and self-pity, has plotted with Egisto (Menéndez) to kill her imprisoned husband, the despotic leader of the city-state of Palacio. (At one point, Tori’s lusty queen wears a “mango” hat that looks an awful lot like a vulva.) Her daughter, Electra (a, well, electrifying Ana Santos), has been shunted aside like Cinderella, but thirsts for revenge, revolutionary style. The royal underlings, Swain (Stefanie Jara) and Helene (Haydée Delgado), their faces covered in black-and-white makeup, mostly try to curry favor with the queen, but as we know from experience, loyalty has a short shelf life when dealing with authoritarians.

Andújar mixes music, comedy, and even a radiostyle soap opera at one point to explore the story of mother-daughter rage, using it as a sharp analog to the crabs-in-the-barrel conditions of people living under tyrants. The different styles of performance here never feel at odds, and it’s a tribute to the directors and the ensemble that the tonal shi s come through so effectively. Santos, so compelling in Aguijón’s La Gran Tirana three years ago, gets a chance to show off her incendiary pipes here as well. It’s a smart and unsettling production that’s arrived right on time. —KERRY REID

ADVERSES Through 12/15: Fri–Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; no show Fri 11/29; Aguijón Theater, 2707 N. Laramie, aguijontheater.org, $35 ($12 Belmont Cragin residents), in Spanish with English subtitles

RSecrets, lies, and laughs

Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone at Second City e.t.c. boasts a stellar ensemble.

Second City e.t.c.’s 48th revue, Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone, builds a little slowly but rewards your patience. That isn’t to say that there are a lot of duds in the bunch. There aren’t, and the six-person cast under the direction of Carisa Barreca is filled with heavy hitters. But it does feel like the material takes a while to catch up with them so that their comedic freak flags can really fly. Using the tropes of old-timey showbiz routines (magic shows, nickelodeon-style piano, vaudeville canes), the company more or less works through the themes of deception and secrets wound through the show. In the

ﬁrst half, that involves scenarios like two sisters stuck in a cruise ship sauna coming clean to each other and a woman introducing her boyfriend to her snobby coworkers at a party, where he ends up lying about being part of SEAL Team 6— and she joins in the lie. The act closes with a real-time “heist” involving a very game audience member.

To my taste, though the occasional political commentary sprinkled throughout has bite, it’s the relationship-based work that carries the show (which is usually how I feel about Second City revues).

Jenelle Cheyne, who is from Canada, does deliver a very funny bit as a Canadian immigration oﬃcer letting us know just how our neighbors to the north see us. Claudia Martinez, who is genderﬂuid, neatly encapsulates what that means in a one-person performance of a mini-musical melodrama, where they’re dressed half as a man, half as a woman.

on his stalking. Even though she’s seemingly always in Tony’s gaze—beautifully conveyed by staging Theresa’s apartment as if we’re looking through her window—the authorities never can ﬁnd Tony, whom Theresa ﬁnds out is an experienced predator of women.

Rebecca Gilman’s script doesn’t really do justice to the supporting characters, but Steve Scott’s direction masterfully draws out the inherent fear at the story’s core.

Other highlights: Tim Metzler as a creepy ventriloquist’s dummy (if that’s not redundant); Meghan Babbe as a lusty chanteuse; Javid Iqbal as a dad desperate to connect with his son (Martinez) who only communicates through DJing (Iqbal’s physical comedy is on point throughout); and Terrence Carey as a pseudo-beatnik poet delivering a rap based on secrets deposited by audience members in buckets at the top of the show. It’s a well-cra ed evening that works to the ensemble’s strengths, even in the less successful sketches. —KERRY REID BEST KEPT SECRET: TELL EVERYONE Open run: Thu 8 PM, Fri–Sat 7 and 10 PM, Sun 7 PM; Second City e.t.c., 230 W. North, second floor, 312337-3992, secondcity.com, $29-$59

RBlind date nightmare

A stalker terrorizes a woman in MadKap’s disturbing Boy Gets Girl.

I’ve never been so creeped out when an actor comes out to help move props during scene changes.

Colton Schied, who plays Tony, the disturbed man stalking Boy Gets Girl’s central character, Theresa (Olivia Winters), is so eﬀective in conveying menace that I could not help but wonder whether Schied’s help as a stagehand in those transitions was meant to project some metatextual threat toward the audience.

I’m sure Schied was just being a good sport, but MadKap’s new production of Boy Gets Girl is certainly unsettling.

Theresa is a lonely New York City journalist ﬁxed up on a blind date with Tony, an IT programmer who says he’s just arrived in the city. It takes one-and-a-half dates for Theresa to realize something’s oﬀ with Tony, so she quickly and politely tries to put the kibosh on any further meetings.

Tony won’t accept Theresa’s decision. He overwhelms Theresa with voicemails and ﬂowers, even showing up at her oﬃce at one point. It’s not long before his calls for attention turn to menace and the promise of violence.

Winters, like Schied, is terriﬁc here, brilliantly conveying not just Theresa’s fear, but her frustration and rage over her helplessness once Tony doubles down

—MATT SIMONETTE BOY GETS GIRL Through 11/24: Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Wed 11/13 1:30 PM; Skokie Theatre, 7924 Lincoln, Skokie, 847-6777761, skokietheatre.org, $42 ($38 seniors/students)

RDeath becomes bae

Mercy Killing traces a romance with the Reaper.

Do you remember playing The Sims and realizing that you could romance (or be romanced by) the Grim Reaper? Well, in a diﬀerent universe where no one speaks Simlish, that’s entirely possible. In the far, far away land of San Francisco, Mercy (Stephanie Fongheiser) stumbles upon a dead body. At the same time, she meets Thana (Madeline Ackerlund) who is an agent of death assigned to life transitions in Frisco.

Sparks ﬂy.

Suddenly Mercy wants to be at death’s beck and call. Thana (who is of a diﬀerent metaphysical realm) and Mercy decide to pursue a relationship. But then the question becomes, “How does one have a relationship with someone who only appears when someone dies?” (I’m sure Dexter would have a few ideas.)

Alandra Hileman’s dark comedy (directed for Open Space Arts by Greta Zandstra) is charming, albeit a little clunky. This quirky love story is an endearing one. It becomes especially intriguing when death-focused podcaster Angie (Lydia Hanman) shows up, along with Harmon, another “Reaper” (played by Artem Kreimer, who plays all the male roles).

My sincerest wish for this show was that it had a bigger playing space. The physicality, especially the ﬁght choreography by Ackerlund, felt like it was being held back by the extremely intimate theater. Even so, it’s hard not to ﬁnd yourself a little bit smitten with the agents of death—or at least the metaphysical representation of how we perceive Thana and Harmon to be. —AMANDA FINN MERCY KILLING Through 11/17: Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; Open Space Arts, 1411 W. Wilson, openspacearts.org, $25 ($20 seniors/students, $15 Open Space Arts members) v

Adverses CARLOS GARCÍA SERVÍN

Photo by Skye Schmidt.

FILMFILMFILM

RHOOP DREAMS AT 30

Sat 11/9, 5: 30 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60 th, $25 general admission, $20 CHF members (“Friends and above”), $10 students and teachers, free for CHF Humanist Circle members and above chicagohumanities.org/events/attend/hoop-dreams-30 th-anniversary

Black dreams are greater than hoops

An upcoming Chicago Humanities event celebrates the 30th anniversary of the classic basketball documentary Hoop Dreams.

By J. PATRICK PATTERSON

If there’s a sport worth obsessing over, it’s basketball. What a beautiful game: shoes squeaking across shiny hardwood floors, the swish of the net when a perfect shot whips through, a contest that requires teamwork but celebrates individual style.

When I was a grammar school hooper, my dad gave me the 1995 book Hoop Dreams: A True Story of Hardship and Triumph by Reader columnist Ben Joravsky. The book is based on the 1994 documentary ﬁlm Hoop Dreams, which follows two Chicago kids, Arthur Agee and William Gates, as they pursue professional basketball careers from eighth grade to freshman year of college.

On Saturday, November 9, Chicago Humanities will gather the two players and the ﬁlmmakers—Steve James, Peter Gilbert, and Frederick Marx—for a panel about the film. After 30 years, Hoop Dreams is still considered one of the greatest American documentaries, not only because of its cinematic storytelling but also its enduring relevance.

The ﬁlm remains timely, in part, because of “the odds that William and Arthur and their families are trying to overcome,” James, the film’s director, told the Reader . “Namely, racism, besieged communities, and the circumscribed opportunities for Black families. This is, needless to say, an unfortunate way in which Hoop Dreams has remained relevant.”

When asked how reception to the ﬁlm has evolved, James said he thinks it has remained about the same, but it’s now being shared across generations. “The di erence is that I think families with sports-dreaming kids often recommend the film to them as something that resonated with them years ago. I like that aspect of Hoop Dreams’s legacy.”

try to model my game after Scottie Pippen, and ﬂicked the ball above my head in bed before falling asleep most nights. While Arthur and William’s love of the game mirrored mine in many ways, their story left me feeling deeply sad, making me rethink my own relationship to basketball. To me, it wasn’t an inspirational story about following one’s dreams; it was about two Black families living in a manufactured nightmare—one with systems designed to make some people fail.

When Arthur and William get into St. Joseph High School, a predominately white Catholic high school in the western suburb of Westchester that closed in 2021, it seems like the opportunity of a lifetime. After all, the likes of two-time NBA champion Isaiah Thomas was a St. Joe’s Charger. But a series of challenges emerge that seriously question the ethics of the school, its storied basketball program, and the basketball recruitment complex as a whole. Arthur and William don’t come from means. Their partial scholarships to St. Joe’s give their families a sense of hope. But when Arthur’s parents lose their jobs, he’s forced to leave St. Joe’s because they can’t a ord the tuition increase. Arthur transfers to John Marshall High School and continues playing ball, but the disruption to his education has lasting e ects.

Hoop Dreams shows us the human cost of continuing to turn a blind eye to the American nightmare many are forced to endure.

When my dad gave me the book, it certainly seemed like the kind of story a basketballobsessed kid like me would revel in. I played year-round, watched old Bulls VHS tapes to

He misses multiple weeks of classes at St. Joe’s because of the debt and loses a semester’s worth of credits after being out of school.

“If he was going out there and he was playing like they had predicted him to play, he wouldn’t be at Marshall,” says the school’s head basketball coach Luther Bedford in the ﬁlm. “Economics wouldn’t have had anything to do with him not being at St. Joe’s. Somebody would have made some kind of arrangement, and the kid would’ve still been there.”

It’s hard to argue with Bedford’s explanation. William is seen as having more potential than Arthur on the basketball court. He’s often

viewed as the next Isaiah Thomas. But when William’s family can’t a ord tuition, a sponsor pays for him.

Even though one of the boys is seen as a potentially more valuable player, he’s still let down by the system. After William blows out his knee, Gene Pingatore, St. Joe’s head basketball coach, leaves it up to William to decide when he returns—a choice some in the ﬁlm believe was irresponsible to entrust to a 16-year-old. William rushes to play again and reinjures his knee, limiting his confidence, playing ability, and arguably his basketball prospects.

“I’m very disappointed . . . in the system. He shouldn’t have been out there playing,” says William’s brother-in-law, Alvin Bibbs, after William reinjures his knee. “If winning’s that important, we need to reevaluate the program.”

It’s no wonder William is eager to get back on the court. The dreams of both Arthur and William are, in fact, hoop dreams: the only way they and others feel they can succeed is to dribble a basketball. They live in a system that gives Black kids very few options—and sometimes no options at all. Hoop Dreams is a reflection of our past and current unwillingness to directly face the racism, exploitation, and inequalities that hurt kids in neighborhoods and education systems across the country. The ﬁlm shines brightest when it alludes to these injustices, largely through its Black subjects.

Later in the movie, the filmmakers insert a Spike Lee cameo during the Nike AllAmerican camp that William attends, in which Lee explains the investment-profit model present in many school basketball programs to the gathered kids.

“You have to realize that nobody cares about you,” says Lee. “You’re Black. You’re a young male. All you’re supposed to do is deal drugs and mug women. The only reason why you’re here—you can make their team win. If their team wins, these schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.”

At one point, Arthur’s mother, Sheila, tells the ﬁlmmakers how di cult it is to live on wel-

RH OOP DREAMS (1994) PG-13, 170 min. Max, Paramount+, streaming free on Philo, Pluto TV, Crackle

fare month to month and make ends meet. Her husband has left after struggling with a drug addiction. The family went without lights and gas for three months, Sheila says, after she missed one welfare appointment. “So you know what the system is saying to me?” Sheila asks the ﬁlmmakers. “Do you know what it’s saying to a lot of women in my predicament? They don’t care.”

Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the story is how often recruiters, coaches, and others at St. Joe’s fail to see the exploitative side of the sports industry. But ultimately the entire system is the real antagonist. As is the mirage of the American Dream. Hoop Dreams shows us the human cost of continuing to turn a blind eye to the American nightmare many are forced to endure.

Throughout Hoop Dreams, several subjects seem to see through the veil at various points, including Arthur and William.

Perhaps William’s disillusion is most evident by the end of the ﬁlm: “Four years ago, that’s all I used to dream about was playing in the NBA,” he says while sitting in his bedroom. “I don’t really dream about it like that anymore. Even though I love playing basketball, I want to do other things with my life too. If I had to stop playing basketball right now, I think I’d still be happy.”

When I first learned Arthur and William’s stories as a kid, my takeaway was similar to that ﬁnal reﬂection: as amazing as basketball is, Black life, and Black dreams, are so much greater than hoops. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

A Criterion movie poster COURTESY KARTEMQUIN FILMS

It was a good week for some rewatches, one of which was timely with Halloween. On Tuesday, Tobe Hooper’s vastly underrated The Mangler (1995) screened at the Alamo Drafthouse as part of the newly minted Terror Tuesday series. I’d only ever watched it at home, so I jumped at the opportunity to see it on the big screen, and the enhanced viewing experience did not disappoint. Based on a short story by Stephen King (though King was among the ﬁlm’s misguided naysayers) and starring Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger himself), it is, to quote a review from the Washington Post, “ludicrous from start to ﬁnish,” an assertion that I wholeheartedly endorse but for the right reasons.

The titular “mangler” is a possessed industrial laundry press with a taste for blood that, at one point, becomes sentient and chases the surviving protagonists down a narrow ﬂight of stairs. It’s wildly absurd, to say the least, and every minute is magic. Not only does it, in my opinion, rank high among Hooper’s swampy sagas of outre horror, but it’s also a wacky excoriation of late-stage capitalism vis-a-vis a contemporary setting that’s still somehow reminiscent of the industrial revolution, making it truly timeless. The mangler literally feeds on the blood of the workers and also the virgin daughters of the town’s powerful and wealthy so that they can maintain their power. For something apparently so ridiculous, it sure resonates as a simulacrum of the American experience.

On Wednesday, Halloween eve, I caught one of the ﬁnal screenings of the monthlong Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child programming, Psykho III: The Musical (1985), a new-to-me feature by Mark Oates and Tom Rubnitz. Much like The Mangler, it, too, is ludicrous from start to finish, but again in the best possible way. Adapted from Oates’s stage musical, which was mounted at the Pyramid Club (a famous queer East Village nightclub) in the early 80s, and cap-

italizing o the recency of Psycho II (1983), it doesn’t deviate too much from its Hitchcockian source material but does add some pretty catchy tunes into the mix. (“Loose Woman on the Loose” stays with you.)

Another noteworthy screening this week was Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 (which I reviewed for the Reader) at AMC River East. As an Eastwood enthusiast, I was eager to join the hordes of cinephiles dedicated to viewing his latest (and purportedly his last) ﬁlm in theaters as a way to defend the auteur against Warner Bros.’ insulting decision to give the ﬁlm just a small release at only 50 theaters nationwide. It’s cause for alarm when a major studio relegates an iconic director making serious adult dramas that are still commercially successful to such a strategy. (It was originally supposed to go straight to streaming.)

Thankfully, there are repertory screenings to ﬁll in the gaps where contemporary exhibition is lacking. This past weekend, the Music Box began its Dangerous Business: Elaine May Matinees series with A New Leaf (1971), one of those ﬁlms that just gets better every time you watch it. I’m telling you, do not miss these. May’s films are not only better on the big screen but with an audience, as well. A woman down the aisle from me was doubling over with laughter; I felt the collective joy in my bones, a much-needed antidote to all the doom and gloom as of late. The next three screenings will likely play a big part in my upcoming columns, so I won’t go too in-depth on the series here, except to say that the director’s cut of Mikey and Nicky (1976) is screening this weekend, and I expect to see you there. Until next time (or Saturday, or Sunday), moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

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

NOW PLAYING

RElectronic Body Movie

What the fuck is electronic body music? Casual appreciators of dark electronic music know terms like “industrial” and “synth punk,” but there’s a genre writhing between the two like a sexed-up mechanical banshee: electronic body music. In Electronic Body Movie, director Pietro Anton explains EBM as a disciplined club sound. It’s dance music—with aggression! Anton is a real head with a passion for electronic music that shows remarkable feeling and imagination, using very narrow, o en cheap constraints. He made his directorial debut in 2018 with the documentary Italo Disco Legacy and expands his crate-digging sense of curiosity by tracing EBM’s roots from early 1980s German punk clubs to a phenomenon that continues thriving today via techno remixes at underground raves.

Clocking in at just shy of an hour, the movie does an impressive job of showing the genre’s spectrum—from its better-known artists like Front 242 and D.A.F. to deeper cuts like Liaisons Dangereuses, Klinik, and the Neon Judgement. EBM’s innovators all seemed to revel in the psychospiritual drive buried in the rhythm patterns of tracks like Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel.” At the same time, they approached emerging technologies like synthesizers with a punk spirit. EBM is presented as a distinctly European cold war phenomenon that was reacting to the imminent threat of nuclear war as much as totalitarianism and groupthink across the political spectrum. Chicagoans will appreciate the thoughtful attention Wax Trax! is given for bringing Front 242 and EBM more broadly to the States; that’s why Electronic Body Movie is screening as part of the city’s multiday farewell to Front 242, which is on its ﬁnal tour. But the ﬁlm’s real success is showing why the sound still feels fresh and alive—and endures because of that. It’s enough to make you want to buy a synth and start touring. —MICCO CAPORALE 54 min. Screening Wed 11/13 6:30 PM, doors at 5:30 PM, Dark Matter Coffee Warehouse, 475 N. Campbell, $30, includes postfilm Q&A with Belgian electronic band Front 242, front242vipfinalweek.rsvpify.com

Heretic

Heretic is clever. Any questionable and/or unsatisfying claims from Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) can be hand-waved away as part and parcel of the ﬁlm’s unwillingness to take a side in its central debate on the nature of belief. Get showtimes and see reviews of everything

As later narrative twists and turns dilute anything of theological interest, the movie still manages to keep viewers locked in, as those same developments maintain a curiosity about where it will all end up. It’s not a smart movie, despite its gestures toward being one, and by the end, it frankly may be stupid. But its cleverness, humor, and committed performances make it an enjoyable ride. The ride starts early, as it quickly brings Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) to Mr. Reed’s door a er a short introduction. The introduction alerts viewers of the ﬁlm’s awkward humor that later plays well with the horror: nervous interjections cut into anxiety-inducing quiet, and moments play simultaneously as jokes and jump scares when Grant ratchets up his performance.

The single-location cat-and-mice show is tense, funny, and briefly intellectually exciting. Writing and directing duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods deploy fluctuations between sound and silence well, and their shot choices keep things feeling off-kilter. Grant joyously delivers a (you guessed it) clever monologue about the history of religion in terms of board games and music, and Barnes does her best to unmoor Mr. Reed in his own game, assuring the audience that our protagonists won’t be simple victims. It’s a fun time at the movies—one that pretends to be something more interesting than it is and falls apart in its finale, but a fun time nonetheless. —KYLE LOGAN R, 110 min. Wide release in theaters v

A still from A New Leaf (1971)

(Top) Electronic Body Movie ; Heretic DOKSTATION; A24

In 2011, Nate Amos moved to Chicago with his friend Ryan Murphy. They were the core members of Opposites, whose skewed songs weaved together sweet indie pop and imaginative experimental rock. When they arrived, they barely had a cultural footprint. But over the next several years, joined by their friend Marcus Drake, they built a record label called Grandpa Bay that became a nexus for a thriving ecosystem of proliﬁc musicians.

Grandpa Bay has been defunct since 2017, but its spirit of overflowing creativity survives. Amos has expanded on Opposites’ sound in New York–based art-pop duo Water From Your Eyes, whose newest release, Everyone’s Crushed , is one of the most acclaimed albums of 2023. His long-running solo project, This Is Lorelei, dropped a record in June, and Drake debuted under his own name earlier this month.

Amos and Murphy came here from Vermont, which doesn’t have a single town even one-tenth the size of Chicago, so it took them a while to get oriented. “Once we found the DIY scene, that’s where I spent the most time hanging out,” Amos says. “As soon as I realized there was a community of people making slightly more fucked-up music, like I was making, I deﬁnitely got excited about that.”

Among the first people Amos connected with was Drake, who played in the whimsical experimental band Evasive Backflip. Amos already had some experience as a studio engineer when he saw a live video of Evasive Backflip in 2013. “I cold-called Marc,” Amos says, “and was like, ‘Can I record an EP for your band?’ That ended up being the very beginning of Grandpa Bay.”

In December 2013, Amos and Murphy launched Grandpa Bay to release music by their neighbors in Chicago’s sprawling DIY scene. The label originally planned to put out four cassettes each month and host a show with all the artists—usually in their Pilsen home, which they also called Grandpa Bay. The initial batch of releases included Opposites’ Printer’s Ink on Everything and Evasive Backﬂip’s Orange You Glad to See . . . Orange You? EP, both recorded by Amos and his Opposites bandmate Kirk Harrison.

In 2014, Grandpa Bay immediately abandoned this ambitious release schedule, but it continued to put out a steady stream of material, mostly digitally. Within that first year, Drake had become part of the operation. By the time Grandpa Bay folded in May 2017, it had released more than 100 albums, EPs, and

Drake and Nate Amos

Grandpa Bay planted seeds that are still sprouting

The newest albums from This Is Lorelei and Marcus Drake speak to the ongoing vitality of the community built by this defunct Chicago indie label.

By LEOR GALIL

singles. The label’s Bandcamp page still hosts 117 of them, and even though that archive is incomplete, it illustrates the depth and diversity of Grandpa Bay’s catalog.

“The label itself was really, at its heart, a collective,” Drake says. “A lot of the stu we released [was] either just [from] friends or stu that Nate had been either working on or recording or mastering. That was kind of our thing.”

Amos and Drake’s new records have had me thinking about Grandpa Bay a lot this year. The label’s Bandcamp page includes 24 albums, EPs, and splits by This Is Lorelei, but Amos put out the new one, Box for Buddy, Box for Star , through Brooklyn indie Double Double Whammy. Lorelei has been evolving for more

than a decade, and Box for Buddy is its most fully realized release. Thankfully, its polish and focus don’t iron out the eclectic weirdness that characterizes Amos’s older music (and the Grandpa Bay catalog in general).

Sooper Records released Drake’s sprawlingly ambitious art-rock album Save Point 1 last Friday. It’s billed as a debut, though Drake has put out plenty of solo material in the past (often on Grandpa Bay) under pseudonyms such as Mao Tzu, Marque Draque, and Jamarcus. But Drake’s proliﬁc output ended not long after Grandpa Bay did. His last release till Save Point 1 was an October 2017 double cassette on Sooper that combined two EPs by Anthony Fremont’s Garden Solutions, a heavy mathrock band led by Drake that also featured

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Amos on bass, Sooper co-owner Nnamdï on drums, and Options main man Seth Engel on guitar.

Save Point 1 feels like a fresh start partly because so much time has passed since the Anthony Fremont anthology. Drake has also funneled the intense energy in his songwriting into something sharper and more compelling, using glassy guitar runs and bubbling percussion to help propel his songs through wild changes like a corkscrew roller coaster. He’s a more advanced musician now than he was in Evasive Backﬂip and Jamarcus, but he still has the same sort of omnidirectional creative spirit you can hear all over the output of Grandpa Bay.

“[Grandpa Bay] felt like a formative thing,” Amos says. “It was kind of like a sandbox we were all playing in. It was recess, and we ﬁgured out our respective interests because we spent so much time doing everything. You try enough things, you’re bound to ﬁnd something that you like.”

Marcus Drake grew up about an hour west of Chicago in Batavia. His older brother got into a band first. “I was watching them play Primus, Oingo Boingo covers, things like that—weird shit, and definitely punk oriented,” Drake says. “So from a young age, I was definitely getting inspired to do crazier stu than just rock ’n’ roll.”

Drake started making his own music in middle school. “My dad had some really archaic recording software,” he says. “The ﬁrst couple things I made resembled early Panda Bear, Animal Collective, the lo-ﬁ freak-folk thing.” Drake began using the name Mao Tzu for his solo recordings, and he also had a band at the time that played radio-friendly pop-punk a la Good Charlotte.

In high school, Drake met other teens into unconventional art. He started a noise band with a handful of them, including his friend Yoshi Perfect. “We’d get together, just us two, and jam and write stuff really influenced by the band This Heat,” he says.

In 2009, Drake graduated and immediately moved to Chicago, where he studied audio design at Flashpoint for a couple years. This helped him land work making music for short films and video games, but he didn’t have much of a network outside school.

“I didn’t really know anyone in Chicago besides my brother and other people who I grew up with,” Drake says. “I decided I really wanted to get into the Chicago music scene. I didn’t really know how.” He played solo shows

Marcus

of Grandpa Bay, ﬂ anking the label logo VERONICA MARTINEZ FOR CHICAGO READER

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at open mikes and started a band that changed names so frequently they had trouble building a crowd. Evasive Backﬂip were his next group, formed in the early 2010s with friends he’d made in Batavia: Drake on bass, Perfect on guitar, and Ben Karas on drums. All three shared vocals and songwriting. “We’d try anything that anyone wanted to do,” Drake says. “It wasn’t like there was one single songwriter.”

Evasive Backflip played a frenetic fusion of math-rock, metal, and funk with deranged aplomb. They approached their music at odd angles that often confused audiences. Drake played his bass like a guitar, which could cause trouble for live sound engineers. “We didn’t have too many allies, really—no one was really on our team,” Drake says. “But then we really clicked with the Opposites guys.”

“Ispent a lot of high school making music in the woods,” says Nate Amos. He lived in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont, and his father, Bob, played bluegrass. At age 14, he asked Ryan Murphy, who played trumpet, to start a ska band.

“He was like, ‘I’m not gonna do that,’” Amos says. “He had just started playing guitar, and we hit it off. We made a ton of really dumb music that, like, 14-year-old boys make. We didn’t really take it seriously in any capacity until we were 19 or 20.”

Beat-scene architect Flying Lotus provided a crucial touchstone for Amos and Murphy’s

plans to hang out. “We had this little band date where we went and got tacos and went and listened to some music,” Drake says. “We just hit it o . Nate then recorded our very next album.”

In December 2013, after Grandpa Bay dropped its first batch of cassettes, Amos visited his family in Saint Johnsbury. He spent the time recording solo material, taking a name for the project from a 1973 episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series called “The Lorelei Signal.” This Is Lorelei’s self-titled debut arrived New Year’s Day 2014. In the album credits on Grandpa Bay’s Bandcamp page, the thank-you list ends with “Marc.”

Rmusical evolution. “We both got really into Los Angeles, the album, and the idea of fusing guitar-based music with more electronic, beat-based music,” Amos says. “That’s something that has stuck with me to this day.”

Amos and Murphy moved to Burlington while still in their teens, but within a couple years they got bored. A high school friend then living in Chicago pitched them on the city.

“We just moved,” Amos says. “It was pretty random; we didn’t really think about it that much.”

The two Vermonters landed in Wrigleyville.

“I’d never lived in a city that big before,” Amos says, “and Wrigley Field is fascinating. It’s, like, where America goes to vomit. At a certain point we ended up in Pilsen.”

They lived across the street from Taqueria el Milagro.

Both Murphy and Amos took classes at Columbia College. Amos would later work in the school’s recording studio, and he says that meeting musicians there likely helped him get a foothold in the local DIY community. “It was the ﬁrst time we naturally fell into a scene,” Amos explains, “so it was exciting.”

yan Murphy came up with the name Grandpa Bay and designed its pixelart logo, which placed the head of a bald, bespectacled old man over the ring of an anchor. Grandpa Bay’s Bandcamp page became a locus for music made by Murphy, Amos, Drake, and their friends. This included Yoshi Perfect’s solo project, Perfect Headache Forever; Seth Engel’s instrumental mathrock band, Bathing Resorts; and Thanks for Coming, an indie-pop trio led by future Water From Your Eyes vocalist Rachel Brown with Amos on drums. In 2016, Brown and Amos issued their debut as Water From Your Eyes, a self-titled cassette EP, on Grandpa Bay.

Even when Amos didn’t play any music on a Grandpa Bay release, he usually had a hand in recording or mixing it. “It gave me an excuse to produce more music for more people, which was what I really loved to do at that point,” Amos says. “The idea of running a label or collective like that, or anything where you’re participating in multiple projects under a larger umbrella, it frames things in a slightly di erent way than if you’re just working on a band really hard all the time.

By the time Grandpa Bay folded in May 2017, it had released more than 100 albums, EPs, and singles. The label’s Bandcamp page still hosts 117 of them.

For me, it made me think about a body of work as having less to do with a particular artist and more of just, like, everything you touch.”

respectively—with matching album art. They challenged each other to record and release as much music as possible. “It was like a friendly race,” Amos says. “We pushed each other to do more, try more, to go further. We had a friendly, like, sparring thing; it was like we were going to a boxing gym.”

“I was experimenting a lot,” Drake says. “I think I had a voice and a sound, and I think it sounds like me, but album to album I would just switch it up and try something different.” In the ﬁ rst half of 2016, Drake dropped a sound-art EP called Subway Grandma (credited to Marque Draque) and the hyperactive prog-punk album Voilà (credited to Jamarcus), which he made while learning to play Perfect’s viola. Amos says their challenge lasted about six months. That August, Drake put out one of his favorite Grandpa Bay works, a score for the video game Tippin’ Ball. Amos and Drake inspired Seth Engel, who’d outgrown the emo and math-rock scenes where he’d been for years. “Meeting those guys—seeing the way they worked—I was like, ‘Oh, these are my people,’” Engel says. “They’re ferociously creating at all times. Whatever I thought I had going on, they really put my output to shame. It was unreal to watch.”

Drake was juggling so much toward the end of Grandpa Bay’s existence that his memory of that period is foggy. “I felt like every single night I was either recording my own stu or at a band practice or playing a show,” he says. “I think I remember once being like, ‘I feel like I’m in seven projects.’” In 2017, as Drake began to burn out, Amos made plans to move to New York City, since Brown lived there. Amos, Murphy, and Drake decided to put Grandpa Bay to bed. The label’s ﬁnal release, This Is Lorelei’s From Static Comes Motion , came out May 31; Amos moved to New York two days later.

IAfter Amos cold-called Drake about a recording, Evasive Backﬂip and Opposites made

Drake’s role in running Grandpa Bay began after he moved in with Amos and Murphy. Their creative lives became enmeshed. Drake joined Opposites, first appearing on the December 2015 album Joon II and Got My Cough. The following month, Drake and Amos issued solo recordings—Lemonade and Lately, You,

n late 2017, Drake left Chicago in a truck and camper he bought with money he’d saved working a job at a medical cannabis dispensary. “I was driving around for, like, half a year,” he says. “I explored a little bit— Arizona, New Mexico. I spent a few months in southern California. But then I felt drawn back to Chicago. Chicago just has this soul that I really appreciate.”

Drake returned to town broke and still in the middle of what would turn out to be a yearslong bout of writer’s block. But the pieces of Save Point 1 were falling into place even

Nate Amos, aka This Is Lorelei, is also half of the duo Water From Your Eyes. EVE ALPERT continued from p. 25

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Marcus Drake, who’s recorded under many aliases, joined the Grandpa Bay crew early.

as he struggled with ﬁguring out how to make music again. He’d gotten hooked on poetry thanks to David Berman of Silver Jews, who’d reached out to Drake after hearing his Tippin’ Ball score. After the pandemic hit, Drake found another dispensary job, where a coworker turned him on to Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 album The Downward Spiral “I was so impressed by the raw, unﬁltered nature of that music,” Drake says. “It kind of sparked something in me—to take everything that I’ve learned but to not put so much judgment on what I was doing and just open the floodgates and let things come out.” He told Engel he was working on new music, but he didn’t share anything till it was ready for mixing.

Engel helped mix Save Point 1, and his first listen to his friend’s first music in seven years was an emotional moment for him. “He put on ‘The Grind,’” says Engel. “I’m not a big crier, but I definitely shed a tear. It was a crazy experience hearing it. I mean, what a fucking great song—it’s so Marc.”

As Amos focused on making Box for Buddy, Box for Star , he changed his usual approach to his solo work. “Before, the whole working concept with Lorelei is that it would be a bunch of songs from a very particular short period of time, released unaltered after that moment in which they were made,” Amos says. “Whereas for this album, I took a step back and thought, ‘Let’s try and take it a little more

seriously.’”

The album opens with a rootsy number, “Angel’s Eye,” which most explicitly aligns Amos with his father’s bluegrass. But if you’ve heard Lorelei before, you’ll also notice his characteristic whimsy and charm in Box for Buddy . It’s connected directly to what he did with Grandpa Bay. “To me, spiritually,” Amos says, “Marc, Ryan, and my dad are all over that album.”

Engel still gets excited by his friends’ success. This past July, Drake became a touring drummer for popular folkrock group Hurray for the Riff Raff (whose bandleader, Alynda Segarra, now lives in Chicago). The same month, Water From Your Eyes played the Pitchfork Music Festival. Engel has remained close with his friends too—in January, Engel’s band Options will open for This Is Lorelei at Schubas as part of Tomorrow Never Knows Festival.

Grandpa Bay is long gone, but Engel remains inspired by it. “It’s a beautiful snapshot of the spirit that I came to Chicago hoping to find—when I moved here, I was so inspired by the relentless, creative work ethic of Joan of Arc and the Tortoise-adjacent bands,” he says. “Watching everyone in [our] loose community just fucking go for it . . . it’s really fun to go back and listen. It’s a really special thing that happened, and I hope for it to happen again.” v

m lgalil@chicagoreader.com

MARGO POPIO

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Soulful singer Paulette McWilliams belongs at center stage

In her six-decade career, she’s made countless stars sound better—but too few people know how great she sounds herself.

By STEVE KRAKOW

Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Soul singer Paulette McWilliams has reached amazing heights, performing with a long list of greats. You’ve almost certainly heard her voice on someone else’s huge radio hit. But do you recognize her name? Maybe you know her as a footnote in the biography of Chaka Khan, the soon-to-befamous friend she recruited to replace her in the band Ask Rufus. But McWilliams deserves to have her own story told, so the Secret History of Chicago Music is taking a swing at summing up her star-studded career—which is still unfolding today.

McWilliams was born Paulette Johnson on the south side of Chicago on December 10, 1948. She grew up around 60th and Peoria, absorbing jazz, R&B, and gospel from hearing her mother singing along to the radio. The young McWilliams would often get a bit of spending money from her uncles by performing at holiday gatherings.

In the 60s, McWilliams gravitated toward the sounds of Motown and the British Invasion, and she formed Paulette & the Cupids with friends at Loretto Academy in Woodlawn, inspired by the likes of the Marvelettes and the Shirelles. The group worked with manager Don Talty, whose clients also included guitarist Phil Upchurch—and Upchurch’s friendship with McWilliams would later prove critical to her career.

In 1965, the Cupids released their only 45, “Teenage Dropout” b/w “He’ll Wait on Me,” on the Prism label from Dayton, Ohio. Both

sides feature impeccable harmonies and McWilliams’s honey- sweet lead vocal, but “Teenage Dropout” stands out. The tune got local airplay (DJ Herb Kent spun it on WVON), and in 2018 the Numero Group included it on the compilation Basement Beehive: The Girl Group Underground. For her senior year, McWilliams switched to Harlan High School in Roseland. After graduation she got a job with a phone company, and at 19 she married (the source of the McWilliams name).

The couple split within a year, while she was pregnant with her only child, so she moved in with her mother. By then McWilliams had a better-paying position at the post o ce, but her income wasn’t enough to a ord her much independence. She hoped she could do better by making music.

Upchurch put her in touch with the American Breed, who were looking for a singer. The famed bubblegum-garage band had scored hits with “Step Out of Your Mind” (in 1967) and “Bend Me, Shape Me” (in 1968), but pop culture changed fast back then too—in 1969, they decided to take a new, more soulful direction.

“I think they wanted two black girls,” McWilliams told PopMatters in a 2014 interview. “There were about 100-something of us all down in Chuck Colbert’s basement! Chuck

was one of the founding members of the American Breed. Light-skinned black guy with a handlebar mustache. I sang ‘Fascinating Rhythm,’ which I heard Morgana King sing, and won that audition!”

The band adopted a dance-friendly sound, hoping to compete with another famous integrated group, Sly & the Family Stone. They gigged all over the eastern half of the country, and while McWilliams was on the road, her parents were happy to watch her baby daughter. “They saw the kind of money I was making,” she said. “In one weekend I’d make $500 or $600. They thought, there’s no job that’s going to pay her like this. The post office didn’t pay like this!”

For about three weeks, they called themselves Smoke, until they discovered another band with that name. At that point, their lineup consisted of McWilliams, keyboardist Kevin Murphy, two members of the American

Breed (bassist Colbert and drummer Lee Graziano), and two members of the band Circus (vocalist Jim Stella and guitarist Vern Pilder).

In 1970, the band took the name Ask Rufus, borrowing it from an advice column in Mechanix Illustrated magazine. American Breed guitarist Al Ciner replaced Pilder, and bassist Willie Weeks came aboard. “We did some of the songs that they had been doing as the American Breed, but we tried to hip them up a little bit,” McWilliams told PopMatters. “Charles Colbert, myself, and Jimmy Stella were the three front-people. We were doing stu like ‘We Can Work It Out’ but funkier.”

The band packed Chicago clubs, drawing crowds that included luminaries such as Odetta, Baby Huey & the Babysitters, and the 5th Dimension. With this lineup, Ask Rufus released just one single, the gospel-flavored “Brand New Day” (written by Al Kooper) backed with the soulfully psychedelic “Read

All About It,” which came out on Epic in 1971. An album allegedly rejected by the label at around the same time now lives on YouTube (among other places), and it’s a solid mix of groovy sitar pop, smoky funk rock, and soulful hymns (including a blowout version of “I Wanna Testify” by pre-Funkadelic band the Parliaments).

By 1972, Ask Rufus had become a dramatically di erent band: Weeks was replaced by Dennis Belfield, Graziano by Andre Fischer, and Stella by keyboardist-vocalist Ron Stockert. Colbert was also gone. McWilliams wanted to spend more time with her daughter, and she decided to leave as well. In the process, she kick-started the mainstream career of her friend Chaka Khan.

McWilliams had remarried when her daughter was three, and she and Khan met through their husbands. McWilliams suggested that Khan take her spot in Ask Rufus, and even though Khan had already replaced Baby Huey in the Baby sitters after he died in 1970, her bandmates resisted at ﬁrst. McWilliams stayed aboard to manage the transition, though, teaching Khan the songs and performing onstage with her. The band changed their name to Rufus, and the rest is history—they had their first smash hit with “Tell Me Something Good,” written by Stevie Wonder, which appeared on their 1974 sophomore album, Rags to Rufus.

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Never Been Here Before. The glossy, expressive LP includes tunes written by Ciner and his former American Breed bandmate Gary Loizzo, and it balances the delicate title track against the thumpin’ disco of “Chump Change.” Sadly, it didn’t sell well, and it’d be her last record under her own name for 30 years. “I had people that believed in me,” McWilliams said, “but unfortunately I didn’t have the people that had the money.”

Let’s Play!

“I had people that believed in me,” McWilliams said, “but unfortunately I didn’t have the people that had the money.”

In the meantime, McWilliams did a lot of amazing work under other people’s names. She sang with Bette Midler, Johnny Mathis, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross (from 1982 till the early 2000s), Marvin Gaye (on his ﬁ nal tour in 1983), and many others. You can hear her on radio fare as diverse as Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony” and David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire).” Perhaps most famously, Quincy Jones invited her to work with Michael Jackson—her voice is one of several on the hit “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” from his 1979 album Off the Wall (where she appears on several tracks, credited or otherwise).

For a while McWilliams mostly did advertising jingle work, which let her make good money without taking her on the road and away from her daughter. Within a couple years, though, Upchurch once again hooked her up. He and McWilliams recorded a song by her friends Donny Hathaway and Tennyson Stephens (an enigmatic pianist I’d love to learn more about), and Upchurch sent it to the great Quincy Jones in Los Angeles.

Jones invited McWilliams to sing lead on the tour supporting his 1974 LP Body Heat For his ’75 platter, Mellow Madness , she cowrote the title track and recorded vocals alongside the likes of Minnie Riperton and Leon Ware. At a concert in Tokyo, Jones surprised her with the chance to sing a duet with her idol Sarah Vaughan.

In 1977, the same year she moved to Los Angeles, McWilliams put out her ﬁrst solo album,

McWilliams relocated to New York in 1986, then returned to California 20 years later. In the aughts, she sang live or in the studio with the likes of Mary J. Blige, Celine Dion, and Steely Dan. She released a Japanese- distributed album called Flow in 2007, followed in 2012 by Telling Stories , where she covers “Ode to Billie Joe” and duets with Bobby Caldwell. If anything, she’s picking up the pace of her solo output— A Woman’s Story came out in 2020, and last year she released These Are the Sweet Things.

McWilliams has been making music professionally for six decades. “I never knew anything else. It was my only focus all my life,” she said. “I really do feel my soul lifted every time I sing.” And she can lift your soul too. “When you make people feel something, I don’t care what genre you’re singing, then you’ve done something.” v

The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com/tag/ secret-history-of-chicago-music.

GOSSIP WOLF

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 8PM

Habib Koité, Aly Keita, Lamine Cissokho In Maurer Hall

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14 8PM The Wild Feathers

w/ special guest Nathan Graham In Maurer Hall

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15 7PM Las Migas In Szold Hall

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15 8PM Emily King

w/ special guest Martin Luke Brown In Maurer Hall

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 8PM Adam Ezra Group In Szold Hall

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17 7PM

Andrew Marlin String Band (Feat. Andrew Marlin of Watchhouse)

w/ special guest Rachel Baiman In Szold Hall

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

WHEN SASCHA DENG AND Wesley Park graduated from Northwestern in 2022, they’d already started work on the debut album by their shoegaze band, Sunshy . They finally released I Don’t Care What Comes Next last month, and it marks them out as one of the most compelling bands of the ongoing shoegaze resurgence. Sunshy’s concise, direct songs combine intimate vocal duets, shimmering blankets of guitar, and aggressively syncopated drumming. Their colossal riﬀs make expert use of one of the genre’s best tricks: they pick the perfect moment to explode into the stratosphere.

“I’ve always liked noisy guitar music,” Park says. “I’ve never really gotten the chance to do [it] before Sunshy.” He’s from Orange County, and he started recording in his bedroom as a high school student, making indie pop under the name Wes Park . Deng grew up in Shanghai and Massachusetts, and she played in a band in high school too. The two of them met at Northwestern’s radio station, WNUR. “We would record live bands and play them on air,” Deng says.

“When we first met, we found out that we had the same pedal, which is this Keeley pedal,” Park says. “It’s the My Bloody Valentine ‘Loomer’ pedal, and we bonded over that.” Deng started playing guitar on Park’s solo material, and about a year before graduation they began working on I Don’t Care What Comes Next

“We actually worked separately,” Deng

says. Each would write most of a song, then show it to the other to add finishing touches. A er graduation, this parallel process was o en a necessity: Park was looking for a job, shuttling back and forth between Chicago and California. When he settled in Chicago in spring 2023, he set about booking gigs for the band—and recruiting musicians to back up him and Deng onstage. Sunshy brought aboard college friend Gwen Giedeman on bass, and Park met Blinker drummer John Golden at an Empty Bottle show. The band debuted as a four-piece at Cole’s in June 2023.

Sunshy got a boost from local shoegaze group Precocious Neophyte after Park learned about them on Reddit and reached out. (Bandleader Jeehye Ham hadn’t yet moved away.) “It’s rare to see other Asian alternative-rock artists in Chicago, let alone a Korean shoegaze act—and they’re really good too,” Park says. “I was going crazy and DMing them. We finally met last year. We’ve been really good friends, and they took us out on our ﬁrst out-of-town date in Milwaukee.”

“They’re so imaginative,” Deng says. “Wesley and I took a lot of inspiration from their songwriting too, when we were writing the newer songs on the album.”

Park says he spent at least a year obsessively mixing I Don’t Care What Comes Next to achieve the sound he heard in his head. To help Sunshy pull off the same effect in concert, the group recently added a new member: Jordan Zamansky, who plays synth, sam-

pler, and tambourine. “Having that synth really made our sound feel so full when we’re performing live,” Deng says. “That’s [been] the missing piece in our live performance for a while.” Sunshy open a show at Cole’s with Zastava, Harvey Waters, and Ira Glass on Friday, November 8; tickets are $13, and the show starts at 10 PM.

ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9 , the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Union Hall (1340 W. Washington) hosts the 20th and ﬁnal CHIRP Record Fair & Other Delights CHIRP Radio founder and general manager Shawn Campbell promises the station will continue to host record-related events, just not a big annual fair that gathers dozens of vendors from around the midwest. This is due in part to shi s in the record-buying landscape. “There weren’t many record fairs in 2003— vinyl collecting was still kind of a niche thing,” Campbell says. “In the years since, a whole bunch of record fairs have sprung up across the city, and they tend to be smaller and a little diﬀerent than ours.”

CHIRP Record Fair & Other Delights has always been a fundraiser for its namesake station. Customers pay a small entrance fee ($7, or $20 for early admission), and vendors pay $100 for a table. “Some of these new record fairs, they don’t charge admission,” Campbell says. “The dealer fees, if they charge any at all, are probably smaller. At the same time, it’s also gotten harder for this to be successful as a fundraiser. So we decided that 20 years was the right time; we’re leaving the city in good hands, with plenty of record fairs.”

The “Other Delights” portion of the fair includes surprise DJ sets and live performances (nobody’s been announced yet). This year, local musicians—including Ariel Zetina , Pinksqueeze , Serengeti , and Desert Liminal —will attend to sell their own merch. At the hour the fair begins, Campbell is usually hosting a show on CHIRP, so she tends to get to Plumbers Hall when it’s already bustling. “When I walk in, I always say, ‘It feels like Brigadoon.’ It feels like it just rises up from the mists,” she says. “And when it’s done, it just sinks back down. And the next year it’s back. So it’s weird—it won’t be rising from the mists again in 2025.”

Early admission to CHIRP Record Fair & Other Delights begins at 9 AM, and general admission starts at 10:30 AM; the event ends at 5 PM. —LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

CHAT PILE

COOL WORLD TOUR + AGRICULTURE / PORCELAIN

VUNDABAR + COURTING

THE DIP + JORDAN MACKAMPA

HAYLEY HEYNDERICKX + LILY BRESHEARS

DEHD

+ GUSTAF + SPUN OUT + DIVINO NIÑO HOSTED BY GRELLY DUVALL LA FEMME

AMIGO THE DEVIL + TK & THE HOLY KNOW-NOTHINGS / RATTLESNAKE MILK

ARC DE SOLEIL HYPNO SUN TOUR

ROBIN PECKNOLD FROM FLEET FOXES

SLOW

PROGRESS WRESTLING

GAME CHANGER WRESTLING

SEXY UNIQUE PODCAST LIVE

ZEAL & ARDOR + GAEREA / PETRA

BILLY WOODS & KENNY SEGAL HIDING PLACES ANNIVERSARY TOUR

MARC REBILLET WE OUTSIDE + DONNA FRANCESCA

MONO

OATH - 25TH ANNIVERSARY FT. 12-PIECE ORCHESTRA

ML BUCH + DOROTHY CARLOS

CLAUDIO

SIMONETTI'S GOBLIN PERFORMING ANTHOLOGY

NEAL FRANCIS + SMUSHIE + LIAM KAZAR × 93XRT

MARIACHI HERENCIA DE MÉXICO

A MARIACHI CHRISTMAS

BONEY JAMES SLOW BURN TOUR

KATIE GAVIN + NANA ADJOA

RESAVOIR + MEI SEMONES

Chicago band Blood Club make postpunk for true believers

Fri 11/8, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $16 in advance. 18+

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of November 7

THURSDAY7

India Ramey Opening acts to be announced. 8 PM, Judson & Moore, 3057 N. Rockwell, $15. 21+

BLOOD CLUB RELEASED A STATEMENT of purpose of sorts with their April single, “No Quiero Bailar” (“I Don’t Want to Dance”). The Chicagobased Mexican American band included the song on their debut album, May’s Lovesick, and though it features spiky, tightly wound rhythms that winkingly repudiate dance-ﬂoor pop, it still has a beat that kids in dark eye makeup can sway and nod to. Front man Jesse Flores made similarly morose sounds with his previous band French Police, but since forming Blood Club with bassist Daniel Vela and guitarist Jorge Calderon, he’s moved further away from that group’s indie-rock inﬂuences

to focus on goth and goth alone. He belts out lyrics like “Since I fell for you / Why can’t you fall for me?” (from the 2024 single “Fall for Me”) in the sort of alienated baritone monotone that’s de rigueur in the genre. There’s not much stylistic variation in the band’s output, which aside from Lovesick also includes a couple self-released EPs, 2022’s Current Lust and 2023’s Crybaby, and a recent session for Audiotree. But stylistic variation isn’t really the point here—Blood Club make music for the true fans who want what they want and want it dressed up in black. If that’s you, Blood Club’s live shows won’t disappoint. —NOAH BERLATSKY

Nashville singer-songwriter India Ramey makes country music with a purpose. During her childhood she had to deal with financial insecurity, familial mental illness, and a father who abused her mother, and it inspired her to become a lawyer pro secuting domestic violence cases. But music was her first love, and when she got laid off in 2009 (during the Great Recession), she returned to it and hasn’t looked back. Ramey o en uses her cra to work through traumas, and on August’s Baptized by the Blaze (Mule Kick), she processes her fi ght to overcome a 12-year addiction to Klonopin, which she’d started taking to cope with a panic disorder she developed while growing up around her dad’s violence. “I went through a lot of stuff—a metamorphosis if you will,” she told the Bluegrass Situation in August. “It was really hard and really scary, but I got so much personal empowerment out of it.” She hopes that her new record—a compact 30 minutes of copious swagger and heartrending storytelling— will help remind other people that they have the inner strength to face their own challenges. That message is most evident on “The Mountain,” where she compares herself to a majestic, indestructible mountain in her ability to endure and even thrive no matter what life throws at her. She isn’t always so serious, though; she also busts out upbeat country ragers, including “Silverado,” a bittersweet ode to a one-night stand. But her songwriting grows more interesting the further she gets from honkytonks, whiskey, and rodeos; the haunting “She Ain’t Never Coming Home” tells the tale of a woman who’s gone missing, leaving those she le behind to speculate whether she was abducted or (as the narrator suggests) ran off to find adventure and romance.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

BLOOD CLUB, FAERYBABYY, VELVET WOUNDS

FRIDAY8

Blood Club See Pick of the Week at le . Faerybabyy and Velvet Wounds open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $16 in advance. 18+

SATURDAY9

Dr. Gabba Ariel Zetina opens. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $24.72. 21+

Dr. Gabba makes acid house for people who romanticize the days of dial-up Internet. Born in San Francisco but raised online, the DJ rose to prominence on social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, where he released piano-driven house tracks flavored with the music from 90s video games, whose aesthetics he played up in accompanying visuals. One of Gabba’s earliest hits was 2022’s “Magic Rider,” whose artwork nods to PlayStation (it parodies the console as “RaveStation”) and the Auto Trader RAC British Touring Car Championship, whose popularity peaked in the 90s. At just over five minutes, the single feels made for cruising. It dri s and melts like a car hugging the bend of an eight-bit highway under a night sky that’s pixelated by stars—though according to Gabba, it’s actually about a floating moon vehicle designed to transport listeners to an underground lunar hotspot. His latest single, “Aurora Beam,” which dropped in October, is a high-energy blend of pings, cascades, and shimmers over a thudding beat, and it feels like Donkey Kong swinging glamorously through the club. Few images exist of the enigmatic creator, who uses an online avatar of Professor Tomoe (an evil scientist from Sailor Moon) and usually performs wearing a bandana, mask, or respirator to conceal his identity. In today’s digital world, it’s rare for an artist to maintain this level of mystery—and he bolsters it with an elaborate backstory that casts him as a renegade doctor who devised a musical medicine but was forced to experiment on his own body. He invented the acid heart, which he keeps beating with dank frequencies that other hearts luckily also respond to. Will yours? At this show, part of Gabba’s first big tour, you can come find out. —MICCO CAPORALE

SUNDAY10

Dani Dobkin & Matt Sargent Jack Langdon & Jeﬀ Kimmel open. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15, $5 livestream. 18+

The duo of Dani Dobkin and Matt Sargent owes its origin to thin walls and COVID restrictions. They’re both instructors in Bard College’s music program, and Sargent, a guitarist and composer, would hear Dobkin’s synthesizer improvisations through the walls while keeping his office hours before the pandemic. When lockdown wiped out public performance opportunities, they struck up a practice of meeting by Zoom to play together. Despite the circumstances that connected them, the two musicians aren’t otherwise an obvious pairing. Sargent’s compositions use consonant instrumentation (such as Zach Rowden’s ten overdubbed double basses on 2019’s Tide or Bill Solomon’s bowed and struck metal percussion on 2018’s Ghost Music) to explore complex frequency relationships over long durations. His guitar playing, which can be heard on his performance of a commissioned work by composer James Romig titled The Fragility of Time , is clean toned, sparse, and precise. Dobkin’s solo work has not been commercially released, but they create perceptionchallenging installations and compositions and improvise with artists from other disciplines; when playing analog synthesizer, they court impermanence and instability by pulling the patches out of a synth in midconcert or amplifying the sounds of contact-miked ceramics being broken. In 2022, the duo transitioned from video-mediated encounters to live performances with audiences, and they ﬁ nd common ground in their curiosity about what can happen when chaos and precision coexist without trying to subdue each other. The outcomes vary dramatically. “Something Between Us,” a 21-minute Zoom session on their 2023 debut CD, Bend (Waveform Alphabet), rises to a dense maelstrom of lucid, delicate sounds. On their new self-released download, Old Dutch Church , Dobkin’s electronics shimmer and writhe like something growing under the light of Sargent’s carefully spaced harmonics. This concert is part of the Frequency Series of new classical and experi-

mental music curated by former Reader staﬀ critic

Peter Margasak, and the opening act is a local duo of organist Jack Langdon and clarinetist Jeﬀ Kimmel. —BILL MEYER

TUESDAY12

Extra Life Anatomy of Habit and Imelda Marcos open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $15. 17+

I heard about heavy avant-garde rock band Extra Life in the late 2000s, when Dan Friel (then of Parts & Labor) recommended their set at a small Brooklyn festival whose name I forget. What I haven’t forgotten, though, is the way Extra Life front man Charlie Looker held court. He pushed his solemn vocals and almost medieval melodic cadences into acrobatics whose muscular definition reminded me of the cantor at my childhood shul. It was a sparse performance—I only remember seeing Looker with a guitar, accompanied by a violinist—so it didn’t prepare me for what I heard when I followed through with a spin through Extra Life’s recordings. The core of the band is a heavy trio of electric guitar, bass, and drums, whose unpredictable spasms and odd meters emphasize Looker’s vocal leaps. On their recent fifth album, The Sacred Vowel (Last Things), Extra Life soften their sound ever so slightly, dialing up the chamber-music warmth in their austere dirges with help from piano parts added by Looker and violin and viola arrangements by Timba Harris (also of Secret Chiefs 3).

On the epic title track, Harris’s sensitive strings give the lurching start-stop rhythms a bigger, more dramatic sweep—the song feels like it’s got room for an entire orchestra. —LEOR GALIL

WEDNESDAY13

Jan Jelinek 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+

Twenty-three years have passed since Jan Jelinek released Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records , where the

budding Berlin producer transformed samples of jazz albums into minimalist techno tracks. The album stretches the definition of “techno” by abandoning the emphasis on beats that’s hardwired into the genre’s DNA. Jelinek’s pitterpatter percussion often melts into murmurs, which encourages me to listen deeper to find other pulses in the music, even those that are barely perceptible. In the years since, Jelinek has leaned harder into his experimental side, moving away from dance music and toward sound art, without straying far from the process that made Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records a cult hit. “I wanted to make collages that consciously refer to other music sources and deal with them in a playful way,” he told Fifteen Questions earlier this year. “This principle has actually remained with me to this day.” May’s Social Engineering (on Jelinek’s Faitiche label) uses speech synthesis to transform phishing emails into meditative collages. Jelinek chops up phrases into gnawing repetitions or layers ersatz speech until the syllables blur, and the more thorough his processing gets, the more closely his work approximates the serene states he created when he was still using these techniques to test the limits of techno. In Jelinek’s hands, even everyday technological annoyances can become a route to a new way of hearing.

—LEOR

GALIL

Dani Dobkin and Matt Sargent perform as a duo. COURTESY THE ARTIST (DOBKIN) AND BY HONG-DA CHIN (SARGENT)

Extra Life

JESSICA HALLOCK

Dr. Gabba COURTESY THE ARTIST Jan Jelinek ÓMAR SVERRISSON

CLASSIFIEDS

JOBS

Cornerstone Research, Inc. seeks Associates in Chicago, IL. Perform advanced economic analysis/modeling for economic litigation consulting projects. Req’s Ph.D. (or ABD) in Econ., Finance, Accounting or Marketing & 1 yr exp in research/teaching in Economics, Finance, or Quant. Analysis; OR an MBA w emphasis in Finance or Accounting plus 2 yrs. exp. in a qualitative position. Req’s knowledge of software such as SAS, STATA, SPSS, TSP or MATLAB. Salary range: $180,000 - $230,000/yr. Submit resume to pdutra@ cornerstone.com. Reference Job ID: ACHI

Goettsch Partners (Chicago, IL) seeks Architectural Intern to develop alt. architectural building design studies & provide doc. of alt. design studies using 2D and 3D architectural design software/ involved in all phases of architectural services on large-scale commercial projects, incl. high-rise oﬃce/hotel/apt. & mixeduse developments in domestic & Asian markets. Must submit electronic version of portfolio w/ex. of academic projects/ digital images/photographs & ex. of technical drawings of high-rise oﬃce/hotel or mixed-use projects. Portfolio must demonstrate samples of work in AutoCAD, Revit & graphic & digital presentation soft. programs. Remote work option 20% of the time. Submit resumes to hr@gpchicago.com, ref. Job ID: 24V10Z24 in the sbj. line .

Market Analyst needed for Il Auto Group, Orland Park, IL, to cond mrkt resr to obt info on automtv retouch in US mrkt; To prvd data anlyz & strtg insgt for bus grwt & prftb; Attnd job fair, info gathr thru internet resrch, & evnt, assct membrsh & ind org; Autmtv cust retn actvts incl ph, SKYPE, & email cont for survy, & inqrs reg satsf, cust pref & needs. Req 2 yrs exp in bus oprtns, admin or mngmnt. FT mail resume to 112 Singletree Rd, Orland Park, IL 60467 - IL Auto Group

Testing Lead(s)

RedMane Technology LLC seeks Testing Lead(s) in Chicago, IL to direct a team of testing

specialists to ensure timely delivery of software solutions, design software and plan test strategies. 5% US travel. Telecommuting permitted. Email CV to yourcareer@redmane.com; reference job code D703800132. E.O.E. yourcareer@redmane.com

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

For fullest consideration, please submit CV, cover letter, and 3 professional references by 11/4/2024 to Shanelle Brandon, University of IL Chicago, University Health Services, 835 South Wolcott Street, Suite E144, Chicago, IL 60612 or via email to shanelle@ uic.edu UIC is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans, & individuals w/ disabilities are encouraged to apply. UIC may conduct background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer letter. Background checks will be performed in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As a qualifying federal contractor, the University of Illinois System uses E-Verify to verify employment eligibility. The University of Illinois System requires candidates selected for hire to disclose any documented ﬁnding of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment and to authorize inquiries to current and former employers regarding findings of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment. For more information, visit https://www.hr.uillinois. edu/cms/One.aspx?portalId=4292&pageId=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.

Structural Engineer USG Corporation is seeking a Structural Engineer in Chicago, IL w/ the following reqmnts: Bachelor’s deg in Civil Engg or Structural Engg or related ﬁeld or foreign equivalent deg. 10 yrs of related exp. Reqd responsibilities: Lead & execute assigned projects & requests by providing technical expertise in Civil/ Structural & Architectural disciplines to over 50 manufacturing plants in North America; Collaborate w/ design teams; 15 % trvl reqd; 100% telecommuting; must live w/in normal commuting distance of Chicago, IL; co headquarters in Chicago, IL. Please visit www.usg.com/careers to view the entire job description & apply.

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

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. Accept-

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Quickies

Raging

debates, why they ghost you, and more quick answers

By DAN SAVAGE

Q: This debate is raging again, Dan, and we need you to issue a ruling. Do straight women belong in gay bars?

a: Some (straight women, gay bars), not all (straight women, gay bars).

Q: Why do men keep ghosting me a er sex? I’m a 25-year-old woman.

a: No clue. You could’ve had a string of bad luck and fucked half a dozen (or more) shitty guys in a row— or, it could be something you’re doing wrong. Even if you don’t think you’re doing anything wrong, once you’ve noticed a pattern of behavior and/or results that makes you unhappy, it’s a good idea to make some changes. Make an effort to meet different kinds of guys in different kinds of ways. Slow your roll (slow your hole). Take some time along the way to engage in constructive introspection and make further changes or course corrections as needed.

Q: How do I stop people from falling in love with me when they meet me?

a: Put that MAGA hat on.

Q: Do all straight men secretly want something up the ass?

a: Considering that not all gay men want something up the ass—not tongues, not dicks, not toys—I feel pretty conﬁdent saying not all straight men want something

up the ass. What’s diﬀerent now is that straight men who do want something up their asses are less likely to feel shame and more likely to ask people (randos, FWBs, sex workers, romantic partners, spouses, etc.) to put something up their asses.

Q: How do you stop wanting what you can’t have?

a: By focusing on something you can actually get—or someone you can actually get—and then willing yourself to believe you wanted this other something or someone as much or more than you wanted the something or someone you couldn’t have.

Q: How do I stay good, giving, and game (GGG) even though I hate getting any kind of hair—including mine—in my mouth? The longer the hair, the worse it feels!

a: Three options come to mind: seek out sex partners with alopecia; keep a hair clipper on the bathroom sink and tell new sex partners a quick trim gets them oral; or make a kinky virtue of an irrational hang-up and actively pursue perverts who get oﬀ on being ordered to keep their bodies hairless.

Q: Are friends of exes or exes of friends always oﬀ-limits?

a: No and no—and since anyone who believes they can declare exes or friends oﬀ-limits needs to learn that

case you can and should tell them to take their dirty dick elsewhere.

Q: Just went exclusive with a new partner last night and this morning an old sexy ﬂing hit me up. For fuck’s sake! What do I do?

to go exclusive with your new partner at all.

Q: What websites should I use to post my foot photos to make lots of money?

they don’t actually have the power to do that, you’re doing people like that a favor when you fuck their friends and exes.

Q: Is it okay to set up an online dating proﬁle just to see what’s out there?

a: It is—but going places and doing things (e.g., joining groups, volunteering, and partying) remains the single best way to see what’s out there.

Q: My wife lost all interest in sex ten years ago but insists I remain monogamous. Arguments o en end with her angrily saying, “No one owes you sex.” What can I say in response to that?

a: “No one owes you celibacy.”

Q: How do you discreetly sniﬀ an uncut cock? Dick cheese is awful.

a: When someone says, “I wanna inhale your cock,” it’s typically not meant literally. (No one wants to aspirate a dick.) Another expression that usually isn’t meant literally: “passing the smell test.” But if you’re gonna be face down in someone’s crotch, you’re gonna inhale at some point . . . so, why not inhale right away? And if someone fails that smell test, tell them to go jump in the shower—unless you consider showing up with a dirty dick in the ﬁrst place to be disqualifying, in which

a: If a single text message from a long-ago ﬂing was all it took to make you regret going exclusive with your new partner last night . . . it was quite obviously a mistake

a: “I’ve done it—I’ve sold some foot pics—and there can be some money in it,” said Tyler Tanner, who has been creating, sharing, and monetizing his adult content online for three years. “The best places to post foot photos would be OnlyFans

and maybe Feetﬁnder. But whether you make money or not really depends on how good you are at marketing, just like any other product!” v

Find Tyler Tanner on Instagram and YouTube under the handle @TylerTannerX. Ask your burning questions, download podcasts, read full column archives, and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love

THE LIVING

– MAR 23,

Other

Sayre Gomez, Behind Door #8, 2018. Acrylic on canvas; 84 × 120 in. (213.3 × 304.8 cm). Collection of Rebekah and Ilan Shalit. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.