Chicago Reader print issue of November 14, 2024 (Vol. 54, No. 7)

The People Issue

THIS WEEK

The People Issue

04 White | Intro Making it about the people 05 Isaacs | The Wrist Artist and illustrator Seitu Hayden’s career has straddled publishing and advertising.

08 Ludwig | The Dream Defender Tanya Cabrera helps undocumented students make their dreams a reality.

10 Triche | The Universe Builder Oluwaseyi “Olu” Adeleke, graphic designer and founder of the streetwear brand Prgrssn, designs his collections for—and about—Black people.

12 Reid | The Latin-Dance Teacher Roberto Herrera’s Latin Techniques Dance Studio offers a space where dance enthusiasts can leave their worries behind.

14 Montoro | The Solar-Cell Chemist Bin Chen is building a more sustainable future.

18 Brown | The Horror-esque Drag King Monsieur Bombastic’s performances incorporate body horror, sex, and death.

20 Prout | The Organizer/Outlaw Ron Camacho made sacrifices for the cause and is reconciling with comrades to build his future.

22 Caporale | The Brand-New Blues Diva Norma Jean McAdams waited her whole life to sing onstage; now at 73, she’s performing as I’m M$. B’Havin.

24 Hugueley | The Busy Beekeeper Beekeeper and illustrator Jana Kinsman has created a sweet handcra ed life.

26 McFadden | The Microcinema Founder Jack McCoy of Sweet Void Cinema on the importance of showcasing work by local filmmakers and why Chicago is the ideal place for filmmaking

28 Galil | The Natural Listener Composer and sound artist Norman W. Long is connecting with his higher self through experimental music and field recordings.

30 Sula | The Sous-Chef Inspired by her upbringing, Javauneeka Jacobs has spent most of her career working at current and former Rick Bayless restaurants.

32 White | The Energy Worker Katia Pérez Fuentes is a creative facilitator, astrologer, hypnotist, and interdisciplinary artist.

34 Mulcahy | The People’s Lawyer Alan Mills reflects on a career built on advocating for his neighbors.

35 Cardoza | The Next-Gen Zinemaker For Zel Hizó, zinemaking is only the beginning of her artistic adventures.

THEATER

38 Plays of Note Our critics recommend Every Brilliant Thing Pilot Island & Her Keepers, and Sofa King Queer

CHICAGO READER | NOVEMBER

FILM

39 Moviegoer Buddy calamity

39 Movies of Note The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is cute but mostly unnecessary, and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is more sheen than substance.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

40 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Las Migas, Front 242, Fingy, and Amythyst Kiah

CLASSIFIEDS

43 Jobs

43 Housing

ON THE COVER

1. Oluwaseyi Adeleke (p. 10)

ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

2. Ron Camacho (p. 20)

ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

3. Jana Kinsman (p. 24)

KIRK WILLIAMSON

4. Tanya Cabrera (p. 8)

YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

5. Bin Chen (p. 14)

YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

6. Roberto Herrera (p. 12)

YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

7. Seitu Hayden (p. 5)

ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

8. Katia Pérez Fuentes (p. 32)

KIRK WILLIAMSON

9. Javauneeka Jacobs (p. 30)

KIRK WILLIAMSON

10. Jack McCoy (p. 26)

YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

11. Norman W. Long (p. 28)

KIRK WILLIAMSON

12. Zel Hizó (p. 35)

SARAH JOYCE FOR CHICAGO READER

13. Monsieur Bombastic (p. 18)

KIRK WILLIAMSON

14. Alan Mills (p. 34)

ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

15. I’m M$. B’Havin (p. 22)

ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

CEO AND PUBLISHER SOLOMON LIEBERMAN

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READER (ISSN

Cover pull quote said by Nicholas Alexander in “I’m M$. B’Havin” by Micco Caporale, p. 22.

Zel Hizó (p. 35) SARAH JOYCE FOR CHICAGO READER

Seitu Hayden (p. 5) ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

The People Issue

Sometime the summer before last, the Reader team gathered in person for an all-staff event organized to review our guiding policies and mission statement, take staff photos, and welcome new team members. Among longtime staffers who hadn’t seen each other since the start of the pandemic, there was a palpable mix of awkward excitement about reconnecting face-to-face, along with the equally awkward giddiness of finally meeting new colleagues we’d only known through their work or brief Zoom appearances.

It was a warm, lovely day, and I was grateful for the chance to connect one-on-one with the editorial team for the first time as a new managing editor. Yet, admittedly, what stayed with me most—and became a recurring topic in side conversations—was my trip to the event, spent in the backseat of a rideshare driven by a candidate for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District commissioner.

“You’re just the person I wanted to see!” they exclaimed a er our polite introductions revealed who we were to each other. The feeling was mutual. I’d always wanted to meet a political candidate in a casual setting, hoping it might reveal a less media-attentive side of their personality.

We discussed their unconventional background, thoughts about the upcoming race, and reasons for running. And for one brief moment, we connected over our shared concerns about serving those we hoped to lead. In that small window of time, I felt connected and engaged with all of Chicago—not just focused on my role in it. I saw myself as a thread in its wonderfully shaggy fabric and, perhaps naively, became convinced these heart-to-heart conversations could help us understand a little more about one another—and perhaps even about what our city is made of.

This is the ninth People Issue, and like last year and every year before it, it’s truly a labor of love for us. Each year, the team debates how many people to feature and how best to represent their stories. Choosing just 15 profiles this year was not easy, but I hope we’ve captured some of the many threads weaving our city together. You’ll find familiar Reader features on art and culture makers, like cartoonist Seitu Hayden (p. 5) and filmmaker Jack McCoy (p. 26), as well as scientists, like Bin Chen (p. 14) and community organizers, like Ron Camacho (p. 20). Maybe you’ll encounter someone unexpected who will inspire you to engage more deeply with Chicagoans and feel a stronger connection to the city’s enduring tapestry.

I’d be remiss not to mention what I love most about our People Issues: the wonderful snapshots they give us of Chicagoans who generously share a moment of their lives with our writers and photographers. Last year, our print edition of the People Issue opened with a photo (by then newly arrived Reader art director James Hosking) of photographer, filmmaker, disability activist, and podcast producer/host Justin Cooper, whose radiant smile lit up our pages against a familiar Chicago fall backdrop. Cooper’s story le a lasting impression on many of us. Tragically, he died July 9. I encourage you to revisit that profile (Vol. 53, No. 6, p. 6), which ends with a quote that seems fitting to repeat here. It captures the essence of what makes Chicagoans so extraordinary and what inspires us to create the People Issue year a er year. Cooper said, “I love my city. Through the good and the bad, I love being here, and I would never leave it. I’ll defend it the moment somebody talks bad about it. I love having a camera in my hand and exploring areas I might not have otherwise. From my chair, I can capture just how gorgeous this city is.” v

—Sheba

Many hands do the work that keeps Chicago going. ELIJAH BARNES, SARAH JOYCE, YIJUN PAN, KIRK WILLIAMSON

Oluwaseyi Adeleke Tanya Cabrera Ron Camacho Bin Chen Seitu Hayden Roberto Herrera

I’m M$. B’Havin

Jana Kinsman Norman W. Long Jack McCoy

Alan Mills

Monsieur BombasticKatia Pérez Fuentes

Javauneeka Jacobs

Zel Hizó

Justin Cooper JAMES HOSKING

We had a lot of the printing industry here, but for publishing it was Britannica and places like Reuben H. Donnelley, which is where I got my first job coming out of school, working on ads for the yellow pages. At one point I met a man named John Ortman, an art director at Foote, Cone & Belding. He could draw his ass off. He was a holdover from the time in advertising when art directors could actually draw. But at some point they said, “No,

Seitu Hayden, artist and illustrator (including graphic biographies of Malcolm X and Barack Obama), has had a career that straddled publishing and advertising. He was a college student when he created Waliku, a Black life comic strip that ran in the Chicago Defender in the 1970s but looks contemporary today. Waliku was part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2021 “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” exhibit.

My intent, coming out of high school, was not to come to Chicago. I’m 71 years old and I’ve been here since 1971, but I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana. My intention was to go to New York, to the School of Visual Arts, camp out on the front door of Marvel Comics, and get hired.

My mom had introduced me to Richard Green, who was known as Grass Green. He was a Black

cartoonist, working for Charlton Comics. He was also doing a strip for a local Black newspaper. He was the first person I could talk comics to in Fort Wayne, and he hired me to ink his work and inspired me. I wanted to become a comic book artist.

I got into the New York School, but they didn’t have a dormitory. So Chicago became the second choice, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. I read somewhere that Walt Disney went there and they had a major in cartooning. And I thought, “If Disney went there, that’s good enough for me.” I found out later he only stayed for a semester.

The Chicago Academy gave me a scholarship for the first year, but what sealed the deal was that they had a connection to what was then a very new Herman Crown Center at Roosevelt University. So I had a place to live. And it was full of young people—international students and students from all the art schools in the city. For somebody who never knew much about Chicago to be living downtown at that time, in that place, it was heaven.

The very first person I met when I moved into the dorm was Marvin Jones, a photography student at Columbia. He helped me get a comic strip in the Daily Defender . It was called the James Gang, but I changed the name to Waliku as I got

you’re the idea guy, you ain’t got time to draw. Get somebody else to do that, get a wrist to do it.” That was the term in the industry for somebody like me, who would draw up the ideas of the copywriters and art directors. Ortman was my introduction to the commercial illustration world. I became his assistant, the nighttime guy. The money was in doing storyboards. And, as much as I wanted to do comics, I was at the point in my life where money was way more important.

Most of my career success I attribute to the Black press and Black-owned businesses. I did a

So where I am now? I’m still a art ho. I keep telling myself I need to do my own thing, like some kind of autobiographical comic about the foibles of my crazy life in an art career in Chicago.

more into Black Body, a national student group I joined. They came up with a ceremony where myself and some other people were granted African names, and my mom picked out Seitu. It means artist, and from then on I used it instead of my birth name, William Eric. I transferred to Columbia College the next year and did four years there.

comic strip, Shop Life, for a magazine called Shoptalk, put out by So Sheen. And my first ad agency job was for Vince Cullers. He opened up the first Black advertising agency I think in the country. At the point I joined Vince, they had Kellogg’s, Illinois Bell—the Black accounts, of course. I always talk about Blackvertising—you’ve got smaller budgets,

Seitu Hayden at home ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Seitu Hayden

The Wrist

Interview by DEANNA ISAACS

Photos by Elijah Barnes

continued from p. 5 lower expectations, but you always overperform. A copywriter there said to me, “You want to be a wrist all your life?” I said, “Man, from what I’ve been able to see, creators have a hidden expiration tag on ‘em and only management can see it. And at some point they’re going to think you’re too old to come up with ideas for the consumer we’re trying to reach now, and then you’re going to be out on your ass.”

I got to work for Foote, Cone & Belding, J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, and then Leo Burnett. I’ve worked in-house, be it as a freelancer or on staff, at the four biggest agencies in this town. But I was coming in on the tail end of an era. What I’ve witnessed is the changing face of illustration because of what’s gone down with technology.

By the time I got to Foote Cone, I had given up on my comic book dream, but I met a guy there who wanted me to draw an independently produced comic called Tales From the Heart, about a young woman’s time in the Peace Corps. We

For somebody who never knew much about Chicago to be living downtown at that time, in that place, it was heaven.

did five issues before somebody at Marvel got wind of it and offered us a deal, a chance to do a graphic novel for an imprint of Marvel called Epic Comics that was a creator-owned label. So they put out two graphic novels, The Temporary Natives and Bloodlines. At that point I thought, maybe I’m going to make it in the comic world a er all. Maybe my dream is going to come true. But it never connected. This is all happening while I’m still doing commercial art and storyboards, in

the early 90s.

My own personal joke is I’m a art ho. If you’re paying, I’m drawing.

At Burnett, they put all us artists underneath the Capps Studio banner. I ended up staying there till they cut me off at the knees when I was 59, which is when that hidden expiration tag popped out on me.

Now I’m a little bit all over the place. I did a Spider-Man sticker book—got to draw my favorite Marvel characters. What I’ve been doing this year is storyboards for an educational YouTube show, Hip Hop Boobly . Now that she’s two and a half, my granddaughter has brought me back into the world of children’s programming. Because I love cartoons. That’s what got me into art in the first place.

And I’ve got Saytoons stores on CafePress, Zazzle, and Amazon Merch. I think about the stuff that I’ve sold all over the world—that in Switzerland or Australia somebody’s got a T-shirt designed by me, and they didn’t care if I was Black, white, or whatever, they just liked what they saw, thought enough of it to buy it.

So where I am now? I’m still a art ho. I keep telling myself I need to do my own thing, like some kind of autobiographical comic about the foibles of my crazy life in an art career in Chicago. I keep going back to that dormitory. It was a magical place, a magical time. v

m disaacs@chicagoreader.com

“I love cartoons. That’s what got me into art in the fi rst place.” Bottom right: Seitu Hayden in his studio ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Igot to hear all these stories growing up: “You have your mother’s looks, but your father’s mouth.” I’m like, “Oh, what a compliment.”

Tanya Cabrera is the chairperson of the Illinois DREAM Fund (ILDF). Born in Chicago, Cabrera grew up on the city’s southwest side, where she discovered her passion for organizing at an early age. While working as a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) counselor, she found a kindred spirit in Rigoberto “Rigo” Padilla-Pérez, a Mexico-born, Chicago-raised student activist who helped found Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL) in 2009. The two continued to share resources and advocate for undocumented immigrant students together until 2023, when Padilla-Pérez passed away from brain cancer at the age of 35.

Under Cabrera’s leadership the ILDF has become a national leader in supporting undocumented immigrant students, and will have awarded more than $2.7 million in scholarships to applicants throughout the state by the end of 2024. For more information, visit ildreamfund.org.

They’re like, “No, your father would curse up a storm—you’re your dad’s daughter.” I’ll take that.

My dad organized in Pilsen and Little Village, working with farmworkers. Driving back from Texas, he was in a car accident. I was the one who got the call—I was ten years old. I was so attached to him.

He was a director at Casa Aztlan. I remember passing out [literature] for the ESL (English as a second language) classes they had at night or him saying, “A family came in. Come play with the kids so I can do intake with the parents.”

When I was in high school, my cousin, who was in college, started doing work with farmworkers. That’s what sparked her activism at El Fuego del Pueblo, a student organization at Northern Illinois University (NIU). And that sparked my organizing work. But it wasn’t until I was a postsecondary coach with CPS—my school was Benito Juarez— that I got to go back to the neighborhood. When

The People

I went for my interview, some people were like, “Oh, you’re Martin’s daughter? I’ve got stories. . .” This is, like, ten years a er he passed. Now, I’m an adult working with different community-based organizations, saying, “Hey, what’s the pipeline look like for Latino students in Pilsen, Little Village, and Back of the Yards?”

When CPS cut its budget, I got cut. I sent out an email and Jerry Doyle from IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) immediately wrote back: “Can I call you?” I’d actually gone off on him when we first met. He was like, “I’ll take care of your kids. Don’t worry.” And I said, “No. Tell me [how] you’re gonna take care of these kids, because you haven’t admitted a Juarez student since 1987.” So, now he’s like, “I want you to come work at IIT.” I was about to have a baby, but he was like, “Take the summer off—come in the fall.” Who was this man?

I told him I wanted to recruit undocumented students because we were a private insti-

tution. He said, “Whatever you want—I just want to get CPS on board.” I don’t know how many CPS students were admitted at IIT at the time, but it was under 30. And they [IIT] were proud of that—it was just embarrassing. That first year we had a team, and we got to recruit undocumented students across Illinois, and our CPS numbers tripled or quadrupled.

I’d met Rigo when I was at Juarez—he was the first undoc-

umented student to come out about his status in Illinois. With Josh Hoyt, who was in charge of ICIRR (Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights) at the time, he’d fought to stay in the U.S. Rigo won and said, “I can fight other cases.” That became his work: keeping families together, going to detention centers, and all this crazy shit.

The movement had started with undocumented students under the Immigrant Youth Justice League. They weren’t organizers; they were high school kids going into college, really navigating those spaces on their own, and [working with] high school counselors or advocates at the institutions.

When Rigo came to Juarez, it was quiet. It was hot as hell in that room—the door was closed and it was foggy. Rigo was sitting perched on the table with his foot on the chair talking to these kids, and they were just zoned out on him. I was also zoned out on him. “You’re telling my kids to come out about their status? I have to protect them.” He’s like, “You don’t have to protect us. . . . We have our own voices.”

“You don’t have to protect us. . . . We have our own voices.”

Tanya Cabrera YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

Tanya Cabrera

The Dream Defender

Interview by JAMIE LUDWIG

Photos by Yijun Pan

That’s when Rigo and I started connecting resources. We’d call each other “liaisons.” “That’s my colleague, my liaison, over at Dominican or NIU.” No official titles, but we were doing the work.

In 2006, the Tribune did an article for their Sunday magazine, and my [undocumented] students were on the cover. . . . When the story came out, it was all over—this was the Tribune—and we started getting money. [With the new money,] we started up a scholarship at Juarez. We had a little reception and gave students money to go to school. But we realized $2,000 to go to UIC (University of Illinois Chicago)—which was $10,000—wasn’t enough. So we explored more options.

Then, in 2011, the Illinois DREAM Act passed

under Governor Quinn. Nobody wanted to take on the chair [of the DREAM Fund Commission] because it was volunteer work. I didn’t think I’d get it because I’m a fucking high school counselor—well, now I was in higher ed, but all these big people could do it. Denise Martinez was at the Governor’s Office [for New Americans] at the time. I said, “Hey, girl. Do me a fucking favor.” I gave her all this stuff [we’d worked on together].

“Don’t let them fuck it up—this is the fucking plan.”

[Soon,] they were like, “Hey, we need you.”

When Trump came into power, that changed everything. [Our priority] immediately became about mental health. Our suicide hotline was getting more calls. “These students are saying they’re

undocumented immigrants.” It was like, oh my god. We’ve gotta prepare. We will never recover from the mental health damage that we’ve done to this population.

These kids I see across different campuses, and when we talk amongst our colleagues, it’s, “Hey, so-and-so, my kid; their skin discoloration, their fatigue, their food insecurities.”

So we worked on the RISE Act—Retention for Illinois Students in Education. It took lots of trips to Springfield, lots of talking to legislators. “Hey, here’s this constituent.” And they’re like, “How can you be undocumented if you’re Lithuanian or African American?” It’s not just a Latino thing. I made sure that when we went to Springfield, we diver-

sified our pool. “Who have we got? Who’s willing to share the testimony?” [The bill passed in 2019.]

Since 2006, I was asking [Democratic state representative] Lisa Hernandez, “Hey, get me on the lottery bill—we need a revenue generator [for the DREAM Fund].” Lisa was trying to do a currency exchange program, like if you send money to Mexico, we’ll take $1.75 and put it towards the fund. I was like, “Unless it’s an investment where we partner with the Treasury, how are we going to generate enough funding?” I was thinking, financially, about long-term stability. All that’s to say, we finally got on [the lottery bill, IL SB1508, sponsored by Democratic state senator Mattie Hunter and Hernandez in 2023].

I didn’t go to Springfield that day [of the vote] because I didn’t have childcare. But I was like, “It’s got to happen—it has to pass.” Rigo was in hospice at the time. And then I got the text from Lisa [Hernandez’s] chief of staff: “Hey, the bill’s on the floor—it’s moving forward. I think we’ve got it.” And she called me and said, “Where are you?” “Oh, I’m with Rigo.” She’s Facetiming with us, and she said, “The bill passed.” I said, “Did you hear that, Rigo?” And he was blinking at me. The day before he passed, we actually signed [the lottery bill] into law. I was going to wait till Monday to go see him, but something in me said “No, go today,” so I got to tell Rigo all of that. “Guess what, motherfucker? We passed the bill. It’s being signed into law.” I shared some time with him and made his parents laugh and just told them everything that he’s done. And then members of the Immigrant Youth Justice League, who were in town from New York and Boston, came. They flew in. I said, “Oh man, the whole crew just walked in right now. I’m gonna let you go, bro. I love you.” And I told them, “Hey, I’m gonna let you guys chill with him. I’m gonna go home, feed the kids, and I’ll be back—I have parking passes you can use.”

We all have tattoos of him. We didn’t put the day he passed, but we put the time: 6:12. His sister called me around 6:20, and I’m like, “I’m sorry. I said I’d be back by 6:00—I’m on my way.” And she’s like, “No, it’s OK. They’re going to be coming for him. I don’t know if you’ll make it.” And I’m like, “Why? What are they doing? Are they showering him? They shouldn’t be moving him.” And she’s like, “No, Tanya, they’re gonna take him away. He passed.” I was in the parking lot, and I was like, “I’ll be right there.”

When I saw everybody, it just felt so final—and I was just there. But, you know, he put on a good fight. v

m jludwig@chicagoreader.com

Tanya Cabrera at UIC, where she works as the university’s assistant vice chancellor for student inclusion. YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

IGraphic designer and founder of the streetwear brand Prgrssn, Oluwaseyi Adeleke, who goes by Olu, is building a universe rich in Blackness. With each piece he creates, the 28-year-old first-generation Nigerian American hopes to educate and inspire. His shop is in L1, a creative business accelerator program and storefront spearheaded by U. Chicago, located under the Garfield Green Line el station. Adeleke has turned the lack of support and direction he felt from the program into a positive by utilizing the location as a community hub, rather than solely a retail space. As trains rumble overhead and he prepares an outdoor set for a live music event that evening, Adeleke shares his thoughts on his journey as a designer, the art of telling Black stories, and the future of Prgrssn.

I did a really amazing sculpture earlier this year for my mother. The sculpture was a fake statue of water bottles. My mom, growing up, she was a hawker, which is defined as the get-ithow-you-live type of job. Like you literally got to go out there and hustle. My mom literally was able to

Oluwaseyi “Olu” Adeleke

got into the [UIC] School of Public Health, and at the same time, I got into the School of Design for grad school back in 2020. I always thought I was going to be a doctor, and I did the art thing for fun. I used to have this saying where I was like, “Immigrant parents make the first sacrifice, which is leaving the only home that they’ve ever known.” Then, first-generation [children] make the second sacrifice, which is basically foregoing what they really want in life to make sure that they establish a good generation for the next ones in line. I had to completely shatter that expectation . It was a very adult decision for me to be like, “Oh, yeah, I could go to medical school and do this very clear, concise path, or I could really roll the dice, because you only got one life.” I’m going to figure out how to pay my bills, and I have been. I feel like I’m making the ultimate sacrifice, which is proving the whole reason why my parents came here in the first place—just for me to pursue my dreams, even if it might not be the dream that they initially wanted. It’s my life. The work that I make is inherently Black. With

the last collection, we were celebrating Black fatherhood. Not only is it trying to highlight this idea that Black fathers are good fathers—I don’t really care about that—what I’m trying to do is preserve aspects of Black culture and vignettes in a way that anyone can look back on it and understand this slice of life that we’re talking about. My ultimate goal with the brand is how do I decolonize myself to remove the white gaze from what I’m creating?

The number one question I get from people who aren’t Black is, “Can I wear it?” And it’s just like, of course, you can wear it if you want, but just understand that the clothing that I’m making is specifically for Black people. The lookbooks will always be about Black people. The collections will always be about Black people. We will also always be trying to tell Black stories. And even trying to actually break out of the mold of telling historical stories, but also telling stories as they’re happening in real-time. The next couple of collections I’m working on are really fun because I’m creating my own stories now, inspired by Black people in my life.

work hard enough and had enough favor in her life to then open up her own studio to sew clothes. Then she met my father and was able to emigrate to the United States. Now her children are all college-educated, following their dreams. But you don’t know who my mom is. O entimes we are forced to tell or listen to stories of people like Dr. King and Malcolm X, who did absolutely amazing things. But for you, probably your biggest superhero in your life, no one has actually heard of. I have a concept, and it’s called Building a Better Universe. That’s essentially what I call my work: universe-building, world-building. There’s a Saba lyric [in his feature on “Sacrifices” that’s] something along the lines of, “I’ll put my all in this art, and to everybody else I’m alternate.” I really love that bar, because it’s this idea that the world outside is so loud and toxic and hates Black people so much that I had to learn about myself through the historical knowledge of Black people that came before me. I would say the first seven years of the brand have been about that. So, if the first seven years were about learning as much about your Blackness as possible, then the next seven years will be now that you’ve learned so much about yourself, why are you trying to retell stories when you’re witnessing Black history in real-time? I have a product that’s about to come out, and

Oluwaseyi Adeleke outside of his store, Prgrssn ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Interview by TYRA NICOLE TRICHE

Photos by Elijah Barnes

it’s a safety pin bracelet. The story goes like this: There’s this little girl and she runs up to this woman at the park and she says, “Oh my goodness, that’s so beautiful!” And the woman says, “Thank you very much. It’s my bracelet. I’ve had it since I was a little girl. Every time I came a little bit closer to one of my dreams, I would gi myself a safety pin. This one was for kindergarten, eighth grade, high school, college, medical school, when I finished my residency program and became a doctor.”

The little girl says, “Oh my goodness, that’s so cool. I have dreams too. Can I have one?” The woman says, “Of course you can.” The little girl says, “Really?”

The woman says, “Of course you can, I can

always make another one.” So she gives the little girl one of her pins and the little girl remembers the woman said she gi ed herself one every time she came a little bit closer. So the little girl says, “Wait, what’s this one for?” And the woman says, “It’s for starting, it’s for dreaming.” Before she runs off, the little girl hugs her and says, “Thanks, Pepper.”

If you’re familiar with my brand building, you know who Pepper is, which is a metaphor for Black women. The Pepper in this scenario is actually my girlfriend. She became the backdrop for this fictional story inspired by very real Black women in my life and to help tell the story about hope. It’s been fun being able to tell the stories of impactful

We will also always be trying to tell Black stories. And even trying to actually break out of the mold of telling historical stories, but also telling stories as they’re happening in real-time.

Black people in my life.

I had a crazy realization yesterday when someone came to the store, where she was like, “I don’t really know how to build an audience.” I told her I have a very strong belief that you can’t create community, you can only facilitate it. What I’ve learned most from this space specifically is if you are someone who enjoys clothing, streetwear, Black history, you’re proud of your Blackness and all that type of stuff; I didn’t create that. There are communities of people like that already. It’s up to my brand to kind of create this space for those types of people to meet each other.

My favorite compliment people tell me is, “Whenever I see somebody on the street wearing your brand, I’m very comfortable walking up to them.” My belief is that you have to be a very specific type of person to want to participate with the brand. On a surface level, it’s a brand about Black people who are proud of their Blackness, but I think on a deeper level, it’s a brand for just very kind people who are looking for other kind people to collectively build around their identity. v

m ttriche@chicagoreader.com

Olu Adeleke outside of (Above) and inside of (Right) Prgrssn ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

preschool all the way to seventh grade, and then I graduated from Gale School.

go to another studio to take some ballet, because it’s something that everyone has to learn.

Roberto Herrera, 37, grew up in Rogers Park, where he began learning to dance with his family. In 2018, he opened Latin Techniques Dance Studio in Albany Park. The studio is now located in Portage Park, where Herrera teaches students— beginners and beyond—how to dance cumbia, salsa, bachata, and guaracha. In addition to offering private and group classes (and teaching specialized choreography for events like quinceñeras and weddings), Latin Techniques hosts dance socials two Fridays every month, where students from all levels, as well as members of the general public, can mix, mingle, and move.

Igrew up in Rogers Park up to the age of 14, 15. Then I moved to Albany Park. I have four sisters and a brother. Recently my brother just passed away—two years ago. I went to Kilmer School from

I started with cumbia, because my parents are Mexican, so cumbia’s a very popular dance in Mexico. And also in Colombia. My mom was the one that taught all my siblings when we were kids. Just growing up, I kind of learned the other genres. Salsa is more like a Cuban and Puerto Rican dance; my mom didn’t know anything about that, so I had to take classes for that. I also took classes for another dance called guaracha, which is more of a Mexico City dance. But cumbia and guaracha, those are the ones that I pretty much grew up with and just learned along the way. My mom would always make parties, like almost every weekend. So that’s how my passion grew since I was a kid.

I took salsa classes at Dance Chicago starting around 19. And then for guaracha, I took those classes at another dance studio that was in Rogers Park, called Key 2 Dance, until I was like 21, but unfortunately, that one closed up a er COVID. I did

People come to my dance studio because they say they forget about their problems.

Before I opened my dance studio, I was working at a pharmacy; I worked there for about eight years. At Key 2 Dance, where my friend Oswaldo taught me how to dance guaracha, he wanted me to also help teach. At first, I didn’t want to, because

I didn’t feel that confidence to teach people how to dance. But then he helped me. I did that off and on between the ages of 23 and 27. A er a few years, one of my ex-students, Alex, contacted me, and he was like, “Hey, Robert, when are you gonna start teaching again?” I told him, “Well, you know, I don’t have any plans of returning to teaching.” I was working at the pharmacy, so that was pretty much my job. He contacted me back in

2017, and then he told me that his friend had a studio in Albany Park. He was like, “You should come back and teach again.” I was like, “You know what? If your friend allows me to teach, then I’ll probably think about it.” So then he contacted me maybe a few days later and told me that his friend had decided that I can teach at the studio. I started getting all this clientele. I put my classes on Facebook, on Instagram, and then a lot of people were contacting me.

[Herrera opened the first location of Latin Techniques Dance Studio on Kedzie in 2018 and moved to the current Portage Park location in February 2024.]

I was afraid. I took the leap of faith, because I didn’t know if this was gonna work or not. But, thankfully, it did all work out.

Because of social media, for one, Latin dancing has become very popular—people kind of already know what each Latin style is. Even with other cultures, even non-Latin people, they already know what’s salsa or what’s bachata or what’s cumbia, because it’s becoming so popular. When they contact me, they do ask me, “So what’s the easiest dance? Or what’s the hardest one?” I do sometimes recommend my students to maybe take the easiest genre, which is bachata. And then they can work their way up from there. But if someone wants to learn salsa, which is the hardest one out of the three that I teach, I make them aware that it

Roberto Herrera YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

Roberto Herrera

The

Interview by KERRY REID

Photos by Yijun Pan

is pretty difficult.

During COVID, I did have to close for about six to seven months. I fell into a depression. I got the SBA [Small Business Administration] loan—that helped me to maintain my studio, because I still had to pay rent, you know? I was doing Uber Eats, unfortunately. That’s what made me depressed

back then, because I was like, “Man, I have my own business and I have to work for another company?”

I still had guidelines to follow with the whole COVID thing [a er reopening], but people did start coming back. People come to my dance studio because they

say they forget about their problems. They just go there, have fun. I have had students that have gotten married and have kids together. I tell them, “I’m gonna charge you guys extra for that.”

But yeah, it’s definitely a place where they feel comfortable. They have a good time. They forget about their problems. I didn’t know that until my

students kept telling me that. I didn’t know I made an impact for each one of my students in a good way, you know? So that makes me really, really happy that I can make a difference in everyone’s lives. v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

Roberto Herrera at Latin Techniques Dance Studio YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

Solar is going to play a big part. The IEA (International Energy Agency) is doing the road mapping of how we should build a more sustainable future using different energy sources. In 2050 the total generation of electricity will consist of a large portion from solar energy. I think it’s more than 30 percent. [ Editor’s note: According to energy think tank Ember, solar’s share of global electricity generation was 5.5 percent in 2023.]

How perovskite was able to scale up in terms of efficiency over the past 15 years is incredible. It improved from below 10 percent power conversion efficiency to more than 26 percent in less than ten years. The same kind of improvements took silicon more than 40 years.

Bin Chen, 33, is a research associate professor in the chemistry department at Northwestern University, where he manages a team of 30 people within the 80-member lab led by Canadian scientist Ted Sargent. The team is developing materials used in renewable energy applications, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office. Chen focuses on perovskite solar cells, a relatively new technology with great potential to increase efficiency and reduce costs. He’s also working on photodetectors using quantum dots and on field-effect transistors using two-dimensional materials, which will help computer processors run faster and use less energy.

Igot my PhD in material science, but I was studying in a place that has an abundance of sunlight, in Arizona. My lab at that time was on the second floor, and I needed to go through the first floor, which [was] the solar research center.

My girlfriend was studying at the University of Toronto, and I wanted to get a job in Toronto, so we [could] end the two-body problem. [Laughs.] Fortunately, there was a very big research group led by professor Ted Sargent at the University of Toronto, hiring a postdoc to work on perovskite-based solar cells. I clearly remember that was April 18 of 2018. So I applied, and then I got admitted, and that’s how I started my solar work.

In 2022, Ted got an offer from Northwestern, and he asked me if I would like to move with him. This was a good opportunity to get into the U.S. system. The U.S. has maybe the best renewable research laboratory, supported by DOE (Department of Energy). That’s the NREL—National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I think that might be the best energy research lab in the whole world. When we were in the University of Toronto, it was basically just us working on solar cells and perovskites. But there are great people [at Northwestern]: professor Mercouri Kanatzidis, professor Mike Wasielewski, and a few others. So we felt that Northwestern has a really, really good platform for us to achieve our vision.

[Renewable energy] is important because it affects our future generations. It’s about sustainable development. What I mean specifically is global warming and the CO2 in the atmosphere that keeps driving up the temperature.

People like to talk about net zero—meaning that if you generate a certain amount of CO2, then you have to capture a certain amount of CO2. It’s not likely to happen if you just keep using nonrenewable energy—like, you’re still burning coal,

You have to actually use renewable energy, so that you reduce the generation of carbon dioxide. That’s the viable way to reduce global warming.

and then at the same time you’re trying to remove the carbon from the atmosphere. You have to actually use renewable energy, so that you reduce the generation of carbon dioxide. That’s the viable way to reduce global warming.

To make silicon [solar cells], you have to purify the silicon at really high temperatures, like 800 Celsius. It’s very expensive, and it is generating a lot of carbon dioxide. But for perovskites, it doesn’t need to go through all this hightemperature processing. You can just make an ink of perovskite solution, and then you can cast it on a substrate or print it, like printing a newspaper—at low temperature, like 100 Celsius. So the energy cost is very low, and the material cost is also low.

Perovskite is a very, very good light absorber. It is much better than silicon. Silicon needs, like, 100-micron thickness in a solar cell, because it doesn’t absorb light very efficiently. But for

Bin Chen at his Northwestern University lab YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

Bin Chen

The Solar-Cell Chemist

Interview by PHILIP MONTORO

Photos by Yujin Pan

A NEW YEAR OF ENTERTAINMENT!

"Zombie" and "Dreams"

Saturday, January 18 7:00 PM

Accomplished Stage, Screen and Television Actor

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Celebrating 50 Years: 1975–2025

"Reminiscing" and "Lonesome Loser"

Saturday, January 25 7:00 PM

"All Out of Love" and "Even the Nights Are Better" Friday, February 21 8:00 PM

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Energy scammers really don’t like it when we give away their secrets and give you the power to stop them. Be on the lookout for new scams involving 3rd-party banking apps.

ComEd will never call or visit your home or business to:

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perovskite, you just need one micron. So it’s like 100 times reduction in the thickness. You can make really, really lightweight perovskite solar cells, and because of the reduction of thickness, you can make it flexible. You could use perovskite on drones or on top of your cars without adding too much weight.

Silicon has a very defined bandgap, meaning it absorbs only a certain fixed amount of the solar spectrum. But perovskite is very adjustable—there are many, many perovskites available, because it’s a name just to describe certain arrangements of atoms in the crystal structure. So you can change the perovskite’s chemistry. You can make it absorb the blue light, you can make it absorb the green light, you can make it absorb the red light or infrared light. That opens up the opportunity for you to combine these different light-absorbing perovskites to make what we call multijunction solar cells—instead of having just one layer of materials, you now have two or three materials absorbing different portions of the sunlight.

Perovskites and silicon make the perfect pair in terms of the color of light that they absorb. Silicon solar is such well-developed technology, so people want to keep the momentum going—if you can do very little by integrating perovskite into silicon technology, then you do it. It doesn’t add

too much cost, and then you get all these benefits of multijunction solar cells with higher efficiency. Perovskites just all of a sudden opened up that possibility. In the past, people have been working on multijunction solar cells, but these are based on so-called III-V semiconductors. They’re so

expensive that they are only used in basically two scenarios: outer space exploration and military. The main challenge is the reliability of those perovskite solar cells. We have seen really significant progress in the past few years—it’s about finding the root cause of degradation mechanisms and a solution for that. We have been collectively as a community improving the device operational lifetime of perovskite from less than ten hours to now more than 2,000 hours.

There is no standard in the industry that is based on perovskite, because it’s so new. So I think if perovskite panels can pass the standard testing for silicon panels, then they will be most likely accepted by consumers, right? We have made big progress on that as well.

You’re testing the solar cells in very humid and high-temperature conditions. You are cycling between -40 Celsius to 85 Celsius. You are doing some hail tests, like throwing things on the panel to see if it breaks. It’s basically stress testing. When we are calculating LCOE (levelized cost of elec-

tricity), it’s calculating the cost of the lifetime energy generation. So comparing to silicon, we have higher efficiency using perovskites—maybe it lasts shorter, but the amount of energy generated over the shorter lifetime can be equal to the energy generated by silicon over a longer lifetime. So in that case, you’ll be OK. And that’s definitely true. That’s a way to get the product to the market sooner.

How much of a concern is it to have lead in the perovskites? There is a calculation for EU regulations called RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances), and it basically calculates how much of a hazardous material you can have in a commercial product, based on weight. Most of the weight comes through the glass and other things, and lead is just a tiny amount—below the threshold. There is lead in silicon panels as well, in the interconnections, soldering things.

If you’re talking about using perovskite-based consumer electronics, your cell phones or computers, that might be a problem—you’re using them every day. But for solar panels outside, it’s most likely OK.

People have been trying to find alternative metals to lead to develop high-efficiency perovskite solar cells. But so far, it’s not very successful. And leadfree compounds face serious stability issues. Most of those lead-free perovskites are based on tin, and those tin compounds really, really like to be oxidized. So that’s the structure breakdown, and you don’t have perovskite anymore. And also the cell fails.

In the broader picture, we need to reduce carbon emissions. It’s not just solar that needs to be there. Other sources of renewable energy will make big contributions—like wind, onshore and offshore. Wind and solar together will account for more than 50 or 60 percent. Then there are some others, like nuclear.

These are just generation, right? And a lot of those technologies, including the two big ones, wind and solar, they are nondispatchable. That means at night or when there’s no wind, you cannot generate any electricity. So that’s a problem. We need to have better storage options—maybe batteries, maybe other forms of chemical storage.

I do consider myself very concerned for the future. What I’d like to see happen, first of all, is the adoption of renewable energy. We cut the use of coal, fossil fuels, so that we don’t keep the temperature going higher and higher. And then we don’t see those icebergs melting and the seas going above some of those island nations, so they have nowhere to live. That’s what I have in mind when I talk about renewable energy. v m pmontoro@chicagoreader.com

Solar will play an increasingly important role in clean energy production. YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

The People Issue

Interview by DMB (D-M BROWN)

Photos by Kirk Williamson

Ore, who often performs as Monsieur Bombastic, is a concept-driven Chicago-based drag king. His performances straddle themes of body horror, sex, and death. In his acts, he o en puts his body through physical extremes like ingesting ink and spitting it out, or gluing feathers to needles with which he pierces his body. Ore grew up as a visual artist in Texas before moving to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has an MFA from the film department there. His bachelor’s, also from SAIC, explored painting and illustration.

Igrew up exhibiting my work at galleries in Texas, Chicago, California, and Germany—I’ve been doing this since I was very, very young. My works were ballpoint ink illustrations. I’ve been on social media since I was 12. When I posted my work online, people took an interest. I couldn’t travel to places like California or

Monsieur Bombastic

The Horror-esque Drag King

Germany, but I either reprinted the work or the curators asked me to ship those drawings. In Germany, I was a semifrequent artist submitter to Semioculus, a collage, dark-art zine collective. My illustrations depicted the human body going through different states of transformation. And while it is perceived as body horror, I try to depict my subject as extracting pleasure from the pain. They’re never literally in pain, but they are embracing those visceral experiences, like bodies melting into their environments, or holding their organs.

I noticed I was developing community online as I was posting my work, and so posting became like a weekly regimen. Fast-forward, I loved video games and wanted to be a video game designer, Monsieur Bombastic KIRK WILLIAMSON

so I did character-based work. I created characters, wrote stories for them, and had them inhabit worlds. They always had, like, a horror-esque edge to it, because that’s what I was interested in. And then a lot of life changes happened for me. I had a lot of deaths in the family, and I started becoming more and more fascinated with decay and the natural curiosity of life a er death. I wanted to be a mortician, so I started doing more anatomical

drawings. And that’s when I started getting into more body horror philosophically, where I’d draw inspiration from anatomical medical studies as early as ten. I just continued making these characters, and they grew increasingly less about design and more about just trying to make compositions to express their stories.

Monsieur Bombastic is my nonsensical drag king character who has evolved dramatically over the past two years. I got into drag quietly and secretly. I was in grad school when I started throwing myself on open stages so I could experiment with method acting. At the time, I was writing about a drag performer, and I wanted to get into the drag scene so I could better communicate his story. You can only learn so much from books or being an audience member.

How do I describe him to you? He’s always been a very unpredictable, chaotic kind of figure who poses to be a very sophisticated gentleman. But he’s proved he has no control of himself. He’s consumed by lust and greed and has always been a tragically written character. So o en he dies at the end of the number. He’s spontaneous and all over. I grew up listening to a lot of nu metal and heavy metal, and I wanted a heavy-metal persona. I grew up drawing lots of clowns too, so his appearance is partially inspired by that. But he became his own being. Some of the elements are still there, but now he’s less of a human, and he’s more of a humanesque creature that is battling with very human desires. That’s how most of my performances are developed now. I am transmasc nonbinary, and Monsieur Bombastic is a king. He is masculine but presents very androgynous.

In one of the more recent bur-

They’re never literally in pain, but they are embracing those visceral experiences, like bodies melting into their environments, or holding their organs.

lesque-y acts that I’ve developed, I’m in all black wearing long white hair. I have long elf ears and resemble a dark elf with an eerie, seductive, menacing presence. And Mr. B is singing to a song by Fever Ray, a very queer, trans singer. Fever Ray’s vocal performance is alluring, satisfying, [with an] ethereal voice—but it has a very sharp edge to it, kind of like a snake’s tongue. It’s how I always imagined Lucifer trying to seduce his victims into sin. Mr. B starts off singing that, and as they strip down, they reveal that their body is completely decrepit and covered in gore; it’s rotting. They pretend that they die, and they succumb to this reality—naked but wearing thighhigh boots. I stand there lifeless for a second until it transitions to a death-metal song called “Body/Prison” by Health. It’s very ambient but very rough, dark.

And so the vibe completely changes, as if Mr. B’s true form has now shown. This is a monster who wants to devour, who’s consumed by lust. The act goes into traditional relaxed moves where I’m grinding on the floor and grinding on

my boa almost entirely naked. Eventually I tear off the flesh from my body. It’s designed in such a way that gives a satisfying skin peel until my chest is exposed and, o entimes, my pasties pop off—or I don’t wear pasties at all. My bare chest

is exposed, and it’s regular human fl esh underneath. Then I remove what is basically a codpiece that I made out of silicone that resembles a flayed dick. So that’s already there, but I remove the back piece and I reveal a jeweled butt plug. I

reveal hole in the club. It was partially inspired by my philosophical research of Georges Bataille. “The Solar Anus” is one of the writings. Bataille talks a lot about sex and death, the corrupt man, and the eroticism of death. I’m very fascinated

How do I describe him to you? He’s always been a very unpredictable, chaotic kind of figure who poses to be a very sophisticated gentleman. But he’s proved he has no control of himself.

with the interaction of the little death, of orgasm to dying.

But in the very beginning, I just threw myself on the weekly open stage at Roscoe’s Drag Race every Tuesday night around 11 PM. I would roll into either work or class early the next morning on two or three hours of sleep, a little bit of glitter still plastered on the side of my face. That’s a weekly competition that attracts a lot of up-and-coming performers and artists by virtue of being one of the only open stages around. A er my first year performing, I was not only a semiregular face at Open Cabaret at Newport Theater, but I was offered the opportunity to coproduce the first allking show.

Monsieur’s journey went from very unruly and pretty unapproachable onstage. And then offstage, I was just very shy and timid. But through the checks and balances of figuring out what it means to be a performer who wants to engage artists and audiences, it’s just been a process of remaining stubborn and continuing to perform whatever opportunity was given to me, and Monsieur naturally evolved. I feel fortunate that I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at. I’m steadily booked. I’m just going to continue to explore more abstract storytelling visually. I’m going to continue to develop my F/X work and hopefully make engaging stuff for people to enjoy. v

m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com

“I grew up drawing

of clowns.” Upper right: Monsieur Bombastic's makeup kit KIRK WILLIAMSON

The People Issue

Interview by KATIE PROUT

by Elijah Barnes

Ron Camacho, 69—artist, organizer, outlaw—is one Chicago’s greatest living history keepers. He was never going to have a small life. Ron’s mother Louise (Lou) was Ojibwe, and, along with Ron, was enrolled in the White Earth Reservation of Minnesota. His great-great-grandfather, George Bonga, was the first Black man born in Minnesota and served as the official witness to the treaty signing that created the reservation.

Ron’s biological father, Valentine (Val), was Mexican American. Valentine was a kind man but seldom present, and for the majority of his childhood a white man named Louie was Ron’s stepfather. As Ron grew up, Louie reacted with violence to him, seemingly because of Ron’s ethnic heritage. Eventually, to protect her son, Ron’s mother divorced Louie and moved with Ron to Uptown, then a working-class neighborhood as racially and ethnically diverse as his own family.

Through the mid 20th century, Uptown was called “Hillbilly Heaven” for the number of white families who were migrating there from Kentucky, North Carolina, and the rest of Appalachia. Simultaneously, in an effort to shirk their treaty obligations, the federal government initiated a program in the 1950s to bus Native Americans from their reservations to cities across the U.S., aiming “to weaken reservation populations and assimilate them into mainstream society.” One of those cities was Chicago. Uptown, with the affordable housing that drew in hillbillies, Black Great Migration families, and others, became the beating heart of the city’s Native American community.

As a young adult in the late 70s, Ron joined the Intercommunal Survival Committee (ISC), a group of mostly white activists organizing Uptown’s white working class on behalf of the Black Panthers. The ISC’s headquarters was on Wilson Avenue, which was then territory of the Wilson Boys, a gang of young white men from Appalachia. Despite not being white, Ron was one of the Wilson Boys. Whether because of his personality, his mixed-race background, or a honed survival skill, Ron was adept at building and maintaining

relationships across race lines. So adept, in fact, that the white members of the ISC noticed and recruited Ron to join their efforts. As a person of color, he offered a perspective they didn’t have, but as a gang member who knew how to survive against the law, Ron alternately volunteered and was tapped to do dangerous, criminalized work. During the following decades, while many others in the ISC went on to work as lawyers, alderpeople, and other city workers, Ron spent years in prison.

Idon’t know why I got political. Sometimes I think I have an ear for things other people don’t. In Minneapolis, my stepfather, Louie, was very abusive to me. I didn’t understand until I was about eight and I started taking punishment for all of my siblings. Everything was cool until my curls started growing out.

My ma tried to make peace between me and Louie. She got him to become a scoutmaster, fed his ego. He wanted to command the room, but accidentally he had a couple good ideas. One

day, he took us scouts to sing Christmas carols at the penitentiary. That was a hip thing; he and I had compromised on something. Us kids were scared—this was the big house! But then, you know, we’d sing our little jingle bells, and then the house just come down, and us little boys were in shock with the noise. [ Laughs. ] Another day, we did an Indian Day sort of thing. Because of him knowing so much of my mother’s family, Louie was able to get an actual buckskin headdress. That was relevant to me, because unknowingly, he was respectful. He didn’t mean to, but he connected me [with my heritage].

I must have been 12 when my ma and I moved into the fourth floor of the Leland Hotel. In 1967, it no longer had the piano in the lobby, but it was still kept up. One couple worked the desk. The woman was stately, a grand ol’ gal in big earrings. You knew she knew allllll the stories. From the fourth floor, I could look right there, over the el structure going over towards Lawrence. It was me and my ma against the world.

When I was 13, the [ 1968 ] DNC happened. I had already experimented with LSD. I liked thinking about new ideas. I remember seeing [the movie] Wild in the Streets. It influenced me. A er that, I got a military shirt [laughs] and bell bottoms. Oh man, we was after bell bottoms. Later, Mike James would use [the term] “rising up angry” from lyrics in a song in the movie. [James, a Chicago organizer and artist, cofounded Rising Up Angry, a radical white working-class organization active on the north side in the 60s and 70s; Rising Up Angry was also the name of the newspaper the organization published.]

Before the ISC, there was the Native American group. There were seven of us in Menard [a state prison in southern Illinois]. Seven [Native Americans] in the whole joint, five of us from Chicago. A couple of us knew each other, so it was easy for us to start working together, and we copied other Indigenous religious movements going on at that

Ron Camacho in the neighborhood near his home ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Ron Camacho The

Photos

time. We could meet once a week, and that was our freedom of religion. We put in a grievance that we had a right to our own thunderbirds as opposed to crosses, crucifixes. They had just won in other states already, other districts, that you could grow your hair long if you were Indian. That’s when we hit them with freedom of religion, and we won.

When I got out, how I got connected to Slim was through Randy Lockhart, one of the Boys, who went off into the military. [Slim Coleman, a lifelong radical activist who organized to help elect Mayor Harold Washington, was also a member of the ISC.] Slim basically said of me, “Try and organize that brother, he knows everybody.” Randy would get kicked out of Vietnam for drugs, and he’d come back strung up, but not before he had snuck back all of these pharmaceutical barbiturates. Anyways, Randy was in the committee a year or two before me. A er I got out of jail in ’77 or ’78, we talked. He knew that if I talked to Big D [then head of the Wilson Boys], the committee would be able to pass out literature in the buildings. And so, I got a directive from Slim to Big D, whose family was from Alabama. They had been in Uptown for a couple generations, and they were just a prominent patriarchal kind of family. D was still in the joint, but with his OK, Slim and the Intercommunal Communists, as they were called then, could go and campaign door to door for the Black Panthers. The gut reaction was, “Panthers? Nobody gonna be bossing me about nothing.” But the maybe 40 females in this organization, as opposed to 15 males at the beginning, they just worked! And just before me, they did a Christmas food giveaway from the stage of Aragon Ballroom, and that worked too. Food distribution doesn’t know color.

youngest male. I had been the youngest Wilson Boy when I joined, when we were told, “Either join, or don’t get caught in the hood anymore.” For the committee, I basically got shoved into the role of chief security because I knew all of the Boys on the avenue, I’d just le everybody on good terms, and I had spent the least time of [the Boys] in jail. I joined the ISC because, when it came down to it, when the party cleared, there was still good things happening. They had a food co-op going on; everybody let down their defenses to go get cheap food. They had the first kind of—they called it “welfare defense.” You didn’t have to go stand in line down at that welfare office, let people intimidate you and put you on hold. We could send somebody down there with you, help take you through that. We had some heroes there, so devoted to defense, that I wholly expect that the welfare application process in Chicago now is a result of what guys [in ISC] like Walter Tunis did, down there arguing all of these points.

The other thing that happened was we started a youth program. Now, half the kids would see me and think, “Oh, we’re gonna have some party,” but nah, we’re gonna play so ball! We’d get a couple diamonds at the lake. I really didn’t do a lot of the hands-on coaching, but I was a supervisor. And the thing is, without realizing it, we had taken on a couple Black teams into the white. And the Latinos were half of one so ball team.

I want to say that because of the larceny, I helped save us from having to liquidate. Instead, we paid the rent that winter. But something in that move, what I did for the org . . . I stole pot down south and brought it back [for the collective to sell]. Something about that, once I had the validation . . . [long pause] I don’t know. Part of it was cool, like, hey, I was a hero. But in that same

You didn’t have to go stand in line down at that welfare office, let people intimidate you and put you on hold.

Alan Mills [of the Uptown People’s Law Center and a former member of ISC, see p. 34 ] hit the ground running when he joined. I don’t remember any other newcomer so eager to get into the thick of it, so confident, and without any battle trophies yet. He was younger than I, and he wasn’t scared of me.

When I moved in with the ISC, I was the

“Try

corner.” It was part of the most dangerous times of my life. Looking back, in one way, I do get to say, “Hey, my way worked too.” But in another way, I know that I suffered so much that I didn’t have to. I really thrashed myself, and I don’t know how to take that out of my memories. There was positives outside of myself, but internally, I had demons to deal with.

few weeks, I learned a lot of lessons in the whole experiment. Randy going into that pot and trading some for heroin, that caused a whole other unfolding, a different direction with this. Instead, it didn’t go to the people. I took a cut, and I went off on a drunk that didn’t stop.

Sometimes it was like, “I’m a part of the furniture. Where are you gonna put me? I’ll be up in a

For a while, I hung around. I [was] still, in a pinch, the go-to guy to help with trouble. But for the most part, you were gonna find me in the box. I don’t know if there was any other way for me, but it was my choice. I had to go on all the rides. I coulda worked for the city, but I turned it down. Still, when I was in the joint, Marc Kaplan [Northside Action for Justice organizer and former member of ISC] would bring my kids to visit me.

Back then, some [ISC members] would check me on stuff I had no right to do. There were good lessons involved. And I loved the kids. We’d have child development, where one parent

one night a week would have all the kids, give them enrichment. There was always this knowing, no matter what: “Hey, I help pay the rent so those kids can learn.” A few years ago, when my son died, that generation, they reached out. I was so thrilled they remembered me. One of them reached out [and said] that they used to [sneak] into my room to wake me up. Nobody wanted to wake me up, but I’d hear that little voice (“Rrroooon”) and I’d never get mad. They were good kids, all of them.

For me, once you put a value on the act of survival, if you can learn early that, “Hey, you’re gonna gain something here, if you don’t get dead.” No matter what, if together, that was as far as we got? Then that’s as good as it was. And hey, that’s OK! But I also got to say, I made the team. I wasn’t blonde-headed, I got curly hair, but I made points, too. v

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and organize that brother, he knows everybody.” ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Grove because I wanted him to do a butt reduction. By the grace of God, he wouldn’t do it. It took almost two decades of therapy to help me accept my looks and work through my stage fright.

In the 90s, I started taking my daughter to art therapy. She’s on the autism spectrum, and I wanted her to have as many opportunities as possible. Her therapist said I had artistic talent, which no one had ever said before. I read [Julia Cameron’s 1992 book] The

Norma Jean McAdams is a 73-year-old hipswinging diva who sings the blues as I’m M$. B’Havin. It’s a dream she put off for decades. In high school, she adored singing but suffered from stage fright and self-consciousness about her face and body. She had severe acne and the kind of generous hourglass figure that wouldn’t come back into vogue till 40 years later. When she was 24, the Texas native came to Chicago for an entrylevel administrative job in Schaumburg. Disco dancing at clubs such as Coconuts in Edgewater and Faces in the Gold Coast allowed her to free herself from the mild-mannered expectations of her day job and unleash an exuberant, sensual side. But a er she married her husband, Paul, in 1981, she put all that aside to settle into life as a suburban mother of two.

For the next three decades, the couple moved around the country, but in 2012 they returned to Chicago to be close to their daughter, who’d recently graduated from Columbia College. A er

Paul underwent open-heart surgery and Norma had a cancer scare, time began to feel precious— they resolved to return to some of the joys of their younger selves. For Norma, that meant singing and dancing. In 2018, the couple became regulars at Buddy Guy’s Legends. Paul would sometimes jam on guitar while Norma fantasized about getting onstage—something that began to feel more urgent a er lockdown. At her first attempt, during an open-mike night at Buddy Guy’s this past February, she couldn’t get over her stage fright. But she made herself go back and try again, and now she’s leading a band with Paul called I’m M$.

B’Havin & Her $exagenarian$.

Igraduated from high school in San Antonio in 1970. All my classmates saw me as a singer. I was in the a cappella choir and church choir and something called Talecade, which was a club of 50 talented kids. But I didn’t see myself that way. I’ve had bad stage fright since I was a kid. My parents would come see me in elementary school, and I’d be onstage, and the next thing you know, I’d faint. Or I was throwing up in a trash can. In high school, my mom enrolled me in a Wendy

Ward charm course to help me get over my stage fright. She thought it would build my confidence to learn etiquette and how to dress. My teacher thought I had talent, so she encouraged me to enter a beauty pageant. I won San Antonio Junior Miss in 1970. I didn’t win state, but I did win the Texas Junior Miss creative and performing arts award for singing. Winning the San Antonio Junior Miss contest felt like a fluke.

As a young woman I had terrible—and I mean terrible—acne, and it prevented me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do. I had a figure too—a rear end. I was always trying to hide it. I mean, it’s hard to hide. I even went to a doctor in Downers

Artist’s Way and started taking classes to explore my talents. I discovered I’m a poet, an artist, a dancer, a singer.

In 2015, I found out I had early stage-one colon cancer. I had to go through a very extensive operation to remove the tumor. When something like that happens at my age, you start thinking about your life and the exit door. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Wow! I’ve been a mother, a wife, and a friend. But who is Norma Jean?”

In 2018, my husband and I went to Buddy Guy’s Legends for the first time because a friend of ours was visiting. It was like a religious experience. There was music that just invoked something in me—the fun, the excitement. I started dancing, and then things progressed. I met a lot of people. The blues community is so loving and warm, and I really felt like they were my family.

My husband played guitar when he was younger. Then you start having children, and your

When something like that happens at my age, you start thinking about your life and the exit door. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Wow! I’ve been a mother, a wife, and a friend. But who is Norma Jean?”

I’m M$. B’Havin at Buddy Guy’s Legends ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Interview by MICCO CAPORALE

Photos by Elijah Barnes

priorities change. Now my daughter is 40, and my son is 36. Paul and I are remembering all these things we’d like to do or wish we could have done. Buddy Guy has jam nights on Wednesdays.

up to sing. My husband and I had been practicing Koko Taylor’s “I’m a Woman.”

When I got onstage, I had that deer-in-theheadlights feeling again. I couldn’t get any words

That night I spoke to Buddy Guy himself. He said, ‘Once you start, don’t stop.’ And I’ve taken him to heart.

They usually have the house band or other jammers come up, and you tell them what song you’re singing, and then boom! Last February, I signed

out. A blues musician named Nicholas Alexander jumped up, walked me back and forth, said, “Look at all the people. Smile at them.” He was trying to

I’m

B’Havin

get me back into my body, but I couldn’t do it.

Then I came back a week later and finally sang. Not that great, but I sang. That night I spoke to Buddy Guy himself. He said, “Once you start, don’t stop.” And I’ve taken him to heart. I continue singing, even if I have a bad night.

There’s a woman I have to give credit to, too: an 88-year-old blues legend named Mary Lane. She saw my potential and helped build my confidence. Even though we’re close in age, she’s been like a mother. Very loving, very supportive. If I messed up, she’d always highlight the good things I did that night.

This May, I started my band with my husband and some friends we met through Buddy Guy’s. Paul gave me my name. Well, he called me “M$. B’Havin.” I added the “I’m” to distinguish myself from others with similar names. My band members are between the ages of 60 and 69, so I call them the $exagenarian$. I chose it because it

sounded nasty. Most people don’t know what a sexagenarian is.

I mostly sing blues or blues-adjacent songs that are relatable to me, like Koko Taylor’s “Voodoo Woman.” Sometimes I change the words to fit me better. My sister-in-law turned me on to a group called Saffire—the Uppity Blues Women. They have a song called “Too Much Butt,” which I like because of my derriere.

Sometimes when I start something, if I don’t feel I’m good at it, I’ll stop. Or I’ll put something down long enough to forget how much I loved it. That’s what I needed to start my singing career: Buddy reminding me, “Once you start, don’t stop.” I’m 73 years old. If I stop now, that’s it. I don’t think I’m being fatalistic. My career won’t be in decades; it’s moment to moment. I don’t want to lose that fun. v

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M$.

with Buddy Guy ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Interview by SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY

Photos by Kirk Williamson

Jana Kinsman has a life all her own as a beekeeper, illustrator, and more. A er falling in love with beekeeping, she began Bike a Bee, a project that places beehives all over Chicago. She does her honey extraction and equipment building out of the Plant in the Back of the Yards, and she sells her honey online and at the 61st Street Farmers Market in Woodlawn. She also runs Doodlebooth, a hand-drawn portrait service for weddings, markets, and events. Through 13 years of self-employment, Kinsman has built a life that ebbs and flows with the seasons.

Istarted off as a graphic designer, and I was totally living the corporate life. I had this wonderful community of creative people around me who were starting businesses. And there was kind of just this attitude of “you can do anything”; everything you see is created by another person, and there’s no rules—just go for it. So I was kind of getting more curious about creating work that

was my own—like I did work and made a product with my own hands.

I’ve also always been really interested in nature since I was extremely young, and the guy I was dating at the time wanted to do an urban homestead sort of lifestyle. I’d grown vegetables in the past and hated it: I find it so tedious, and it just wasn’t inspiring. So I was like, well, what can you do with livestock in the city? I thought bees would be something fun, and I took a winter beekeeping class with the Chicago Honey Co-op, a really great beekeeping organization here in the city, and I was just totally enthralled. Things definitely didn’t work out with the guy, but beekeeping has been a lifelong love.

So I did a beekeeping apprenticeship in Portland, Oregon. The guy [who ran it] had multiple hives throughout Eugene, Oregon. I feel like I got 5 percent of the knowledge taking the class and 95 percent just working with the bees. You take a class, but you have no idea what the whole universe of bees is like until you’re actually hands-on, working with the colonies.

[In Oregon,] we would visit the hives in his truck to check up on them. At the time, I only had a bike,

so I was like, I want to do this in Chicago, but I want to do it on a bike. It’s so contrived, but bikes are really a window to the world, and if you can learn how to fix it, then you have transportation for life. I had a roommate at the time, Brent, and we just did everything by bike. We would buy new mattresses or sofas on Craigslist, and we would transport them on bike with a complicated trailer setup. And I just wanted to prove that you could really do anything by bicycle. I look crazy with this trailer full of stuff, and so you know, more people notice me, and I get to wave at people and get them interested in the hives.

I was 23, 24, and I started Bike a Bee. I created a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for getting ten hives started; I cold-called community gardens and asked them if they wanted to host beehives. Pretty much all of them said yes. So then I started that spring in 2012 with ten hives, and I’ve just been growing ever since.

Now, most of the hives are in community gardens around the south side, so people get to live and work around them, walk by them when they’re going to their house. They can see them here, and it just enriches their lives, I think. And then they

get to try honey that’s made in their neighborhood. Everybody who hosts the hive gets a share of honey from the hives, and they’re in smaller jars so that they can hopefully hand out multiples to people in their neighborhood.

Apiaries in different neighborhoods end up producing different flavors because the bees are visiting plants in different quantities. In a neighborhood like Englewood, where there’s a lot more vacant land, you get

a lot more clover influence, because a lot of clover grows on the ground; at high locations near parks, they visit a lot of trees like linden trees, chestnuts, buckeyes, black locust. It’s like a taste representation of the neighborhood.

Being the type of person I am, where I learn best by just doing, starting my own apprenticeship was a total no-brainer for me. I started it right away—I thought I can just easily offer this to people, so they can start beekeeping, even if they have no idea how to start or how to manage a hive. And I’ve got to watch so many people see the magic of it, and it just changes their life, and it makes them think about the world differently.

Simultaneously, I started a second business called Doodlebooth, where people hire me for events to draw quick portraits of them. I get hired at weddings, I do the Renegade Cra Fair every year, and I get to go to a lot of fun places around the country. I think my style has gotten more refined through the years. I can draw more people faster, like 22 people per hour. They’re kind of just nice, cute pictures of people.

And for a long time, that would subsidize all the beekeeping work, because I didn’t make much money from doing bees and honey. But now, it’s pretty neck and neck, because I have about 96 hives now and produce a lot of honey. Beyond that, I did construction part time at the Renaissance Society, which is a contemporary art museum in Hyde Park.

Jana Kinsman KIRK WILLIAMSON

Jana Kinsman

The Busy Beekeeper

I’ve always been really eager to say yes to something that excites me: a really fun opportunity comes along, and I’m really into chasing novel things. Which gets me in a lot of trouble, because then I’m like, oh, well, I’m not doing the work that I should have been doing for this or that, and I’m doing something else. But I think I finally figured it out this year—13 years into self-employment, I’m like, OK, I’m not stretching myself thin anymore.

I grew up out in Wheaton, Illinois, and then I moved here when I was 19, so I spent an equal amount of time living there and in Chicago, because I’m 38. I was living in Logan Square when I started Bike a Bee and Doodlebooth, and then I’ve slowly been moving south, to Pilsen, then McKinley Park, and then I bought my house in West Englewood, I think in December 2018.

I’ve always wanted a house. I grew up in an old house, and I watched my dad and grandpa do so much rehab on it. I always was curious about doing that myself. It’s like a beautiful red brick two-flat,

and I bought the vacant lot next door to it, so I’ve got this big garden with hives, and it’s magical. I got a really wonderful block with great neighbors, and the house was just cared for enough: a lot of the original features were in place, like the hardwood floors and the trim.

It’s been a real adventure, rehabbing it, redoing

in a construction zone.

When the bee stuff slows down in October, November, then I either work on the house, or like last year, I was able to travel. I visited my sister in California. I did some really big hikes. Wedding season is in the fall, and doing Doodlebooth means I’m only working weekends for events and

It’s an interesting life dynamic—to live within the rhythms of nature. Especially with those becoming more and more unpredictable.

all the electrical and plumbing, and then learning all of that stuff myself as I went with the help of smart friends and family. It’s almost done; I only recommend it if you’re crazy and don’t mind living

stuff. [When I worked at the Ren], they only have four shows a year and take a summer off, so it [was] a nice rhythm.

It’s an interesting life dynamic—to live within the rhythms of nature. Especially with those becoming more and more unpredictable.

With beekeeping, every year I learn more and more, and everything happens in a year cycle. So I try one thing one year, and I’m like, OK, well, that didn’t work, and I guess I’ll try it a different way next year. There’s no quick iteration on trying things, you kind of just see how the season plays out, and then each season is different. So there’s not even a baseline, it’s very unpredictable.

I got really intimate, too, with the rhythms of nature by being on a bike. In the beginning, when I was still learning the rhythms of all of the nectar plants and foliage, stuff that the bees eat, being on the ground, I got to see which trees were blooming, when and who was gonna bloom next. And I can change what I’m doing with the bees in order to make time for that upcoming bloom. In all my work, there’s so much critical thinking involved, and that really is what lights me up. I love the flexibility in my life, and I love the variability and the seasonality, even though it can be really challenging when I go from this beautiful lifestyle of beekeeping every day to working in my basement. I do a lot of hard mental work to become OK with that change, and then spring comes and I have to be a beekeeper all over again. But I love the changes, and every year is new with beekeeping, like every Doodlebooth gig is different, a different set of people. You know, they did these studies about how doing different things slows time down—it slows your perception of time down. I feel like that’s part of my underlying desire to keep doing different things, because that keeps life slow and spicy. v

weekend. I’ve had to coordinate an experimental film festival [called Peripheries] that Nick Swanton [put on] along with Joshua Minsoo Kim, M. Woods, and Elise Schierbeek from Video Data Bank. Joshua with [experimental music newsletter] Tone Glow had a screening on Friday and Saturday, so I helped run the Saturday screening. On Wednesdays, we have a screenwriting workshop that I run. What else? It’s really kind of strange, on a

Jack McCoy, 28, is the founder and owner of Sweet Void Cinema, a production company and microcinema in Humboldt Park. McCoy grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and came to Chicago in 2014 to study cinema at Columbia College Chicago. He’s lived in various neighborhoods across the city and currently resides in Lincoln Square.

Sweet Void Cinema started conceptually in 2020 as a collaboration between myself, Jon Anderson, Jose Perez, and Aliya Haq, as a production company first and foremost. Aliya Haq came up with the name—we had dozens of meetings trying to figure out what to call it. We had a feature fall apart in early 2021, so we had a little bit of excess money. We had talked about having a space that would have enough room for a screen, and then we found this place that was pretty perfect. We slowly, over the course of the next year as we were producing shorts, started developing it as a theater. I think it was late 2021—

Jose, Jon, and I took a U-Haul up to Milwaukee to a theater that never opened, and they were selling all these mint-condition theater seats. We had this guy, Jack Stearns, come in and build out the rest of the theater. One of our employees, Lino Gil—his wife, Jamie Nance, is a wonderful artist. We had her paint this mural in the space.

The microtheater side of [Sweet Void] started to really take off, as we were really dedicated to screening work that was as accessible as possible for people. At first, that really meant free. As we started working this year with Josh Mabe and [ Reader contributor] Joshua Minsoo Kim, we’ve done some more paid screenings that are really just to give experimental cinema that hasn’t really been screened in the city a place to live. At least to me, it seemed pretty clear that there has been a lack of this type of work being screened in the city.

Our mission as a production company is to create work that speaks to everyday Chicagoans. We’re trying to make films by and for Chicagoans. We have a couple of transplants like myself, but a lot of the people that we work with have lived here their entire lives, like Jose Perez, who lives

in Little Village. We just produced his feature last year, What Rhymes with Magdalena? [2024]. When it comes to the type of work we’re trying to screen, experimental cinema is a big thing that has definitely drawn in some audiences, but in general, we’ve been trying to make it as accessible as possible for Chicagoans of any level of professionalism or genre to be able to get their work screened.

We have this monthly shorts festival that started in late 2022; basically, we accept anything that was made by a Chicagoan. If they made it in the city, if they edited it in the city, whatever—we screen it. Really, Sweet Void Cinema is about accessibility and giving young filmmakers—or old filmmakers—a chance to get their work either produced or screened. (I’d like to throw out there also, we are technically vertically integrated, so we beat Sony to the punch by about three years. That’s a bit of a joke, but it’s also honest.)

[My day-to-day work] is different based on the week. Like this week, I have [to] quality check a feature I directed back in 2022 that we’re trying to submit to Slamdance. I’ve had to hunt down a home base for Harvey Pullings [II]’s shoot next

daily basis I don’t really know what I’m actually gonna be up to. Then I’m also starting to think, “What are we gonna do next year? Are we gonna do a feature?” I’m not sure; who’s to say?

The screenwriting workshop has been going on at Sweet Void since January 2022, and I’m more proud of it than anything else we do here. Every week, somewhere between six and ten people have joined in person or virtually, and collectively, we’ve written hundreds of pages. Two of the three shorts we’re producing this year are from the workshop—Jay Villalobos’s Brain Rot and Dogs and Jason Nimako-Boateng’s Foxgloves and Other Slowly Dying Things—and I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of the shorts written this year end up on our docket next year. It’s become a good way for film students, graduates, people who never went to film school, or people with a passing interest in it to learn and grow as writers. I went through the screenwriting program at Columbia College and found it to be rather lacking, in discipline from the teachers and in rigor from the students. Here, we have cultivated a motivated community which pushes each member to grow, and grow we have! I’m very proud of the group.

My love of film came from, largely, the movies I grew up with, which were a lot of blockbusters, like James Cameron movies, dumb action movies with Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford (who my mom loved). I sort of moved, when I was in college, toward more of the arthouse people, like Ingmar Bergman or

Jack McCoy at Sweet Void Cinema YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

Jack McCoy

The Microcinema Founder

Interview by TARYN MCFADDEN

Photos by Yijun Pan

Michelangelo Antonioni. I definitely, with the pandemic, was watching too many movies. Being able to quantify how many movies I’d watched in something like Letterboxd, I found pretty recently, was something that was very unhealthy. If I’m watching like three features a day, that’s not . . . that’s not very good. [Laughs] And I do think there’s a serious

that really reflected in their movies. And I think you see a certain cost come into the movies themselves when that’s the case. So personally, this year, I’ve been trying to be able to square what I care about outside of film with film itself.

[Since] the pandemic hit, I’ve been particularly . . . nervous, I guess, would be the right word,

We’re trying to make films by and for Chicagoans.

problem with filmmakers right now, where it seems like the primary thing they care about are their movies—as opposed to, say, real-world issues, or, I don’t know, religion, or their family—and you see

and wary of getting sick again. I had cancer; I did six months of chemotherapy back in 2018. So I’ve really been pretty strict with a mask policy, both on our production end and in our theatrical

distribution. At certain points, we’ve had people COVID test before coming into the theater. We’ve had to shut down the theater a few times if cases have been particularly bad or if someone in the office has gotten sick. But it’s definitely been challenging. Since basically very few other places in the city have any type of COVID policy, there’s a bit of a weird anachronism that I think people sometimes feel coming in—they’re like, “Oh, I need a mask?” Well, yeah, you do.

Really, I think it comes down to the city and the state and the federal government never really having handled it and feeling like it’s my responsibility in the space that I do control. But I also know, like, the moment you leave the space, that there is absolutely no control over it. It’s just a bit frustrating. What I would like to do is allow Sweet Void to be more of an autonomous entity and be able to really just focus on writing and directing, since that’s what I love the most. Still programming at the theater would be nice, as well. With Sweet Void, I’m hoping that it can be a center of microfilmmakers being able to get a start in the city. Chicago’s been where a lot of really phenomenal filmmakers have come out of at many different times in history. It seems like right now there’s a

real dearth of any type of cultural innovation, and I think that’s largely due to rent prices—people being priced out of different places like New York or LA that have historically been real centers of culture.

I think for the film world, [Chicago] is a pretty perfect city. Rent isn’t astronomical, so I think there’s an actual chance for working-class people to make movies here. Getting permits and locations is significantly cheaper, as well. And the tax incentive here in Illinois is really great—I think it’s the second best in the country.

Even as meager as the money that we have [is], we have a real opportunity for people who don’t ordinarily get the opportunity to make work to be able to make work—ideally, good work, a thing that people across the country and the world would want to see. I guess that’s a lo y ambition for Sweet Void, but I’m hopeful that there is some type of future trajectory for it to play that type of role. Or at least maybe signal to people who have large amounts of capital that they want to put into movies to be like, “Ah, Chicago , that makes sense.” v

tmcfadden@chicagoreader.com

music. Another huge influence was a guy named Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky.

I was doing these massive works with concrete and stuffed animals, making huge installations. I realized it wasn’t gonna be sustainable for me. It was really fortuitous that Martin Schmidt from Matmos was still working there [at SFAI]—I was able to get tutorials from him for basic programs like SoundEdit 16. I was able to TA a class for

Norman W. Long

Composer and sound artist Norman W. Long got hooked on experimental music in the 1990s as a student at Illinois State University. He evolved his multimedia practice as he earned a master of fine arts (in “new genres”) at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001 and a master’s in landscape architecture at Cornell University in 2008. Long has applied his expertise in fi eld recording and ecology to documenting the changing nature of south-side neighborhoods and parks, especially Big Marsh Park in South Deering. Chicagoans can experience this with him firsthand on the soundwalks he leads with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Istarted off playing clarinet through middle school, high school, and some college. Then, along with my listening habits, I started getting into more . . . what you’d call industrial, avantgarde, or electroacoustic music. Like many Black musicians, I started listening and learned how to

listen in the Black Catholic church. I went to Catholic school at Our Lady Gate of Heaven in Jeffrey Manor. It’s no longer there. I’m not Catholic—I just went to the school. The choir director for the church was my sixth-grade teacher.

For the most part I listened to mainly Top 40 as a kid. Sixth and seventh grade, I started listening to more house music and hip-hop and getting more into rock music. I already knew older people who were listening to house music on WBMX and WGCI, so I knew where to turn for that, but for the hip-hop stuff, it was WHPK. I taped stuff off the radio. I can’t really brag about listening to super avant-garde music. My taste got more complex and more esoteric as time went on, and my curiosities just went further and further the more resources I had to explore. When I got into ISU, I started borrowing and listening to records at the library there.

There was a graduate recital for clarinet. One dude did a Steve Reich piece. He was basically playing his clarinet to a tape. I thought, “Wait a minute, I thought that was cheating,” not understanding tape music and what he was doing. I was like, “I’m really drawn to this.” I went back to

the library, listened to [Reich’s] Music for 18 Musicians and Drumming. I started listening to other avant-garde music.

I started grad school in ’99 at the San Francisco Art Institute. My work had been heavily influenced by a strange confluence of people: bell hooks, Mike Kelley, Doris Salcedo, and other artists who did massive works. Also this tradition of African American yard shows had a lot of influence—a lot of Yoruba traditions and the placement of objects and juxtapositions of such to give meaning. One of the books that I found to be really helpful with my particular visual aesthetics was by Robert Farris Thompson, called Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas. I still kept my interest in music—and especially experimental

[sound artist] Laetitia Sonami. She taught me how to use Pro Tools, field recordings, soundwalks. I got a lot of great readings from her, but also really great exercises and assignments as far as digital music goes. I was able to have installations that may not have a lot of things in them, but adding sound to them ended up being somewhat satisfying.

I started doing more field recording. Walking meditation was really important to me. By 2004, I had a series of panic attacks—headaches, vomiting, and all sorts of things—and had to go on medication. I thought, “This is a really good time to think about meditation and self-care.” A lot of that came through walking and listening—that also helped me regain focus.

I started taking my MiniDisc recorder out for my walks. I started focusing on, “Let me get some environmental sounds and then process them.” I started working with other people on video; I would record my walk, and they would record video for it. Or I’d record something from my

I started taking my MiniDisc recorder out for my walks. I started focusing on, “Let me get some environmental sounds and then process them.”

Norman W. Long KIRK WILLIAMSON

Interview by LEOR GALIL

Photos by Kirk Williamson

That was really nice, to see more people of color being interested in what I do. . . . I’m not practicing, learning, or researching in a vacuum.

walk to a performance, and then the performance would be me mixing in my walk to the performance—for instance, I would take a commute from Oakland to San Francisco, and I’d record my commute, and the sounds of my commute would be what the performance was, in combination with sounds from a police scanner and some digital sounds. I didn’t really get into synthesizer sounds

art scene; I had such a negative experience in San Francisco. In 2008, I had some friends that I was doing performances with; I had a chance to perform some of my sound works. These guys had a residency at Kavi Gupta Gallery [in Chicago].

The organizers, Lee Montgomery and Jon Brumit, asked me if I wanted to do another performance for Neighborhood Public Radio, which was the

sounds of Lincoln Park in the [Lincoln Park Conservatory] Fern Room; there was a lot of granular synthesis and a lot of dub-style echo that was going on. I was able to have some sort of relationship with a gallery [ESS] that was reputable in the city; it was a very positive thing that I wasn’t really expecting. I was working a regular job, but I was able to do that and get put in touch with people like Eric Leonardson, who I’m on the board with for the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.

I didn’t perform too many times as a solo musician—it was very sporadic. It felt like I couldn’t get any gigs. I started playing regularly with Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brotherhood, working with mainly synths and samples. There were quite a few projects that Angel had me in. I would say 2018 is when I started playing more with people and

until later. My art practice, it morphed into soundart performance practice, and that’s where it was by 2005.

The visual art practice wasn’t really there anymore. I wasn’t interested in engaging with the

project in residence there.

By 2009 I was able to get an installation up at the Florasonic series for Experimental Sound Studio [ESS]. The Florasonic series was in Lincoln Park, and I thought it’d be cool to put all the

doing more solo things as well. That was due to John Daniel and Michael Stumpf’s label, Reserve Matinee—[they] put out a compilation of some of the older work I had done [2018’s Electro-Acoustic Dubcology I–IV].

I started doing the soundwalks in 2015. The Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology partnered with the Night Out in the Parks program. When we first started doing them, I started leading them at Washington Park, and then once Big Marsh opened, I started leading walks there around 2016. Being able to have more relationships and friendships with people who may not have the same practices I do but have different perspectives, backgrounds, or resources they pull from—I find that to be very interesting. Over the last few years, [I’ve seen] many Black folks who are very interested in field recordings and experimental music. That was really nice, to see more people of color being interested in what I do—or parts of particular discourses around ecology, history, electronics, or synthesis. That affected me a lot. I’m not practicing, learning, or researching in a vacuum. There are people who are listening now. I keep doing it to get in touch with my own higher self. That’s really important to me, coming from a background where I don’t feel as valued and I wasn’t anything to anybody. But with the art, I am something to myself. I’m doing what it is that is mine to do. v

m lgalil@chicagoreader.com

Norman W. Long on a soundwalk at Marian R. Byrnes Natural Area KIRK WILLIAMSON

The People Issue

Interview by MIKE SULA

Photos by Kirk Williamson

After graduating culinary school, Javauneeka Jacobs, 27, has spent most of her career—apart from an internship at Disney’s Epcot—working at current and former Rick Bayless restaurants like Xoco, Leña Brava, Cruz Blanca, Topolobampo, and the flagship Frontera Grill.

Igrew up in a farm town. I had a cornfield in my backyard. As kids, you just meddle around with things. I had no idea it was field corn. They use it to feed cattle, and it’s hard. It’s not for consumption. When I was ten or 12, I picked some, and I put them on the stove. I’m waiting, waiting, the house smells like corn, but I’m waiting. My mom wakes up from her nap. “Why do you have this field corn in a pot?” I’m like, “I’ve been cooking it for hours.” She’s like, “It’s not gonna cook.”

We were not farmers. My parents are from the south side of Chicago, born and raised, and as they started to have a family, they moved out to the suburbs and bought a home in Harvard, and that’s where I grew up.

My mom grew up with a lot of southern food. There were six of us all day. It would seem like we didn’t have anything in the house, and then all of a sudden we had this big meal on our table. She was always creative and just doing stuff from her heart, very intuitively.

I wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. Even though I wasn’t physically cooking with her, I was doing a lot of watching. Couldn’t ask any questions, nothing. It was just her thing, and she didn’t want to take the time to show this kid what to do when she just needed to cook and get it done. That was her safe space, and that’s what she loves to do. I always loved to eat. Anything you put in front of me was really good because she’s a good cook.

As I got a little bit older, I tried to repeat what she was doing. And I also watched a lot of cooking shows. They were able to explain it to me. I just started putting it together. I remember having my

notebook and then presenting it to my mom, like, “Can you cook this?” Sometimes she would cook it, and sometimes she would say, “Oh, let’s not do that.”

I’ve always had a garden. My mom always had a garden, so when I started ag class [in high school], I [could] actually choose what I’m gonna plant and we could do it better.

I didn’t have exposure to restaurants. Our fancy dinner was Applebee’s. But where you got the good food was at people’s houses. My best friend, she’s from Zacatecas. I remember going to her

house, and her mom would be making pozole, or she’d be cleaning nopales. I would ask her mom, “How do you do that?” And my friend would get

As far as my career, I think that this is the place that I want to be.

upset: “Did you come to cook with my mom, or did you come to hang out with me?”

That was the first time I had a taco. I didn’t know what cilantro and onion was, and I was eating it. And [saying], “Whatever’s on here, it tastes so good.” The first time I had a tamale, I didn’t know how to eat it. I bit into the husk and they were laughing at me. When I was in junior high, my dad was like, “You need to figure out what you’re gonna do for the rest of your life. You should think of something that’s not gonna go away.” I was going really hard in sports. I was in basketball, track, cross-country, and I performed really well, and I did receive scholarships.

I think I had the epiphany: everyone’s gotta eat. And so, “Hey, I like the cooking channel. I love food. I love chemistry and biology. I wonder if I can combine that with cooking and see where that gets me?”

I looked up culinary schools. I had everything organized, so I presented it to my parents, and I said, “I’m not gonna take any scholarships. I am going to go to culinary school.” And my dad’s reaction was: “Being a chef is not a real job.” My mom’s [was], “She’s doing what she wants to do, and I’m gonna support her.” I ended up going to Le Cordon Bleu. School started at 10. So I took the 7 AM train for two hours. My first week, I’m in love. This is for me. This is like having your own science experiment and being able to eat it too. I learned everything that I wanted to. And then I really wanted to get some hands-on experience, a year into culinary school, and I kind of wanted to move out because of the commute. I ran around just trying to get a job, and I got turned away from 30 different restaurants. I was really discouraged.

I was really close with my chef instructor, who had taught someone that was the chef of Xoco, and they needed someone to come in for a stage. I staged for two weeks, and eventually they gave me a job.

Javauneeka Jacobs at Topolobampo KIRK WILLIAMSON

Javauneeka Jacobs

The Sous-Chef

I think I had the

epiphany:

everyone’s gotta eat.

I wanted to work at a restaurant who had the same morals as I did: Are we working with our local farms? From a cook’s perspective, it was a full circle moment for me.

I was very fortunate to get that. I was really killing it. I put tiny empanadas on the menu for an amuse for Topolo. And they’ve been on the menu for like five years now.

And then [the] pandemic happens and [they’re] doing whatever they could to bring people back to work. They started doing Topolo 2.0, which was held up in the library, and Rick asked me if I wanted to be his culinary assistant for his YouTube channel. He trained me how to write a recipe, how to test a recipe, and it was really cool,

I’ll arrive to work around 7–7:15, and I’ll start consolidating the walk-in, doing my inventory, everyone’s prep list. And we taste dishes every day. So I’ll write the dishes that we’re gonna taste for the day. And then we just get right into the prep list. I try to get a lot of my prep done before we open up, so I can expo the line. Around 11:30 we open up for service. And then we finish service around, like, two to three o’clock, depending on how busy we are. And then I’ll just wrap up the kitchen. Then if I’m up to it, I’ll go to the gym again and go home, go on a walk with my dog. I’ll tend to my plot in the community garden.

My balcony is not very big, but it’s definitely full of lots and lots of plants. It’s facing east. We get

super intimate. I learned a whole different side of things, like how to do a swap. How does the TV world work?

We started getting a little bit busier in the restaurants. I was 24, and I became the youngest sous-chef at Frontera Grill. Everything I’ve learned, including at Disney, has helped me with this job because I run the production kitchen and we make huge batches of tamales and stuff like that.

amazing sunlight. I have figs. I have raspberries, lemon in a pot. We have lemongrass, ginger, eggplants, tomatoes. I have some flowers, and basil, thyme, rosemary, all of that, all the regular herbs and chiles.

We have this rule at home where we don’t cook any Mexican food. But as far as my career, I think that this is the place that I want to be. v

m msula@chicagoreader.com

Jacobs working at Rick Bayless’s Frontera Grill KIRK WILLIAMSON

The People Issue

healthy”—this is where I’m cautious with my words. But, there was a lot of trauma in my family. There was a lot of disconnection, a lot of repair.

So that’s one of the things that I’m ultimately always out to heal—the familial holes, the generational traumas, the disconnection from my family and our more cultural practices, the imposter syndrome with claiming any kind of more folk healing. Because I know that’s there, but it’s very

Katia Pérez Fuentes

The Energy Worker

different when you don’t have someone who’s a direct mentor in your family who is teaching you things, when you’re kind of on your own and you’re just like, “I know this!”

Creative facilitator, astrologer, hypnotist, and interdisciplinary artist Katia Pérez Fuentes, 29, is originally from New Mexico via Chihuahua, Mexico. They moved to Chicago ten years ago to get a BFA in studio arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have since worked as an arts worker for citywide museums and art spaces. Five years ago, they became a full-time traditional astrologer and certified hypnotist, having studied with Mychal A. Bryan at the Oraculos School of Astrology, Los Angeles–based curandera Erika Buenaflor, and the Divine Feminine School of Hypnosis’s Shauna Cummins. They continue to facilitate art activities and especially enjoy working with public artworks in and around Pilsen, encouraging their community to “just pause everything else and exist and make and experience some kind of curiosity, play, joy, celebration.”

Igrew up in a very immigrant neighborhood, a very low-income neighborhood in New Mexico.

Up until this point, I’m the first of anyone in my family to enter the arts world, and to do the work that I do is such a privilege and such an honor. To be working with visual artists, literary artists, and also now like this magical-mystical—the mystical arts part of it—on a professional level is such a gi .

I’m a first-generation migrant, first-generation college student. I hold the highest level of education in my family. I am the first everything, basically.

I came to Chicago just because someone said I couldn’t, and I set out to prove them wrong. It’s a very challenging story. And maybe I’m like, “It doesn’t really matter to share that! I don’t resonate with that narrative anymore.” But I had such audacity when I was younger. And I had a lot of anger. I also was in a lot of pain consistently— chronic pain.

And this is where the trauma narrative of, like, “Oh, I don’t have to keep repeating or convincing people that what I experienced wasn’t good or

Self-development ended up looking like these other things that have always interested me, which was astrology, hypnosis. It was the thing that I was doing on the side to keep myself kind of sane. Because when you work in the arts and you make cultural projects for a living—you make murals, you teach classes, you make art for different projects—what does your hobby become? What do you do when you’re like, “I need to do something different”? Hypnosis was a tool I constantly used, but it was imperfect. It didn’t have everything that I necessarily wanted it to have. To be totally candid with you, I’d spend my day doing DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility] and anti-racism advocacy, and I couldn’t at the time find any hypnotists that also aligned with my values that are always trying to go the route that supports Black and Brown and queer creatives.

I waited; I searched for the right teacher and eventually found them. Actually, my first astrology teacher [was Mychal A. Bryan]. I met him at the Queer Astrology Conference and would later have more than 500 hours of live instruction with him. I ended up going with him because he was also a trained hypnotherapist. I was like, “Oh cool, then I can get a feel for the hypnosis and also the

Katia Pérez Fuentes at Mana Contemporary Chicago KIRK WILLIAMSON

Interview by SHEBA WHITE

Photos by Kirk Williamson

Pérez Fuentes performs an herbal smoke cleanse with a white fi re limpia and dried lavender.

KIRK WILLIAMSON

astrology and also the tarot, the I Ching [Chinese book on divination]”—this person did it all.

And then eventually from there, I was able to find two other mentors: one [Erika Buenaflor] that does more traditional curanderismo— healing rites from a Mesoamerican perspective—[and] specializes in folk healing and soul retrieval, although she refers to the practice as shamanic journeying; and then a certified hypnotist [Shauna Cummins] who practices in New York. She teaches from a divinely feminine approach while integrating principles from the lineage of Melissa Tiers’s neurosciencedriven hypnosis. And so I had these varying perspectives—one from my exact cultural background, a reconnecting Indigenous Brown person, Chicana, you know. And then I have a white lady in New York working from a science-based perspective.

At the same time that I was learning both of these, I was like, “There’s a lot of similarities, we’re just using different words.” And one is leaning more on the folk traditions and just that kind of trust, that communal trust. And the other one is maybe leaning a little bit less on the folky stuff. They’re both very science-based. I don’t want to say that [one] is more science-y, because they’re both equally wonderful teachers. It was just different words that they were using. My curandera teacher has never used hypnosis. But in that class, I was like, “Oh, I’m doing the same kind of energetic and neural pathway rewiring in both of these courses.” What I’m inherently doing is this energy work.

I found that my saving grace was understanding that leisure was the ultimate use of our time . . . Anything that is celebratory, anything that advances your learning, anything that is playful.

They’re a really wonderful pairing. It’s really helped me, which is why I offer the combination of both of those practices in my sessions with people. Because I don’t think I would have gotten to this point if I had just stuck to one or the other. I think it was doing it in tandem that really helped me.

“I came to Chicago just because someone said I couldn’t, and I set out to prove them wrong.” KIRK WILLIAMSON

This is one thing that’s part of a larger ecosystem that enhances the quality of our life. And that for me has been the biggest thing. I see

everything that I do as interconnected because when I was struggling to go through college and make it, I found that it was very difficult to just make art and create things because I was so exhausted. I felt that I had to fight my way through certain things, and if it wasn’t me fighting through things, then it was other people in my community that I cared about fighting for their rights or

their certain issues. It was this constant kind of advocacy. There are so many unspoken privileges between who makes it in the art world—who has time, energy, resources to just make art and be like, “Oh yes, I’m just gonna explore this theory or this practice or this lifestyle.”

I found that my saving grace was understanding that leisure was the ultimate use of our time.

And “leisure” as defined by things that enrich the quality of your life, and that was defined as anything that was celebratory. Doing this because we want to do this. Anything that is celebratory, anything that advances your learning, anything that is playful. v

m swhite@chicagoreader.com

that original organization. Walter Tunis ran our welfare defense program for many years. He was himself a welfare recipient, and, even though he was largely illiterate, had learned enough about the regulations to go and argue with people. But when he’d lose a case, he wouldn’t go to court. He would organize 100 people to picket in front of the welfare office. It’s a different way of approaching a legal problem—from a very

Alan Mills, 68, came to Chicago to pursue a law degree at Northwestern and subsequently became involved with Uptown People’s Law Center (UPLC). This year he plans to step down from the executive director role of the organization, a position he has held for a decade following over 20 years as UPLC’s legal director.

My mom had been active in the civil rights movement in Baltimore, where I grew up. One of the first [times when] people had thrown blood onto dra records in order to protest the Vietnam War happened in Baltimore, led by Philip Berrigan, who was one of my mom’s friends. He was defended by a lawyer who was also active in the civil rights movement, so my mom knew him as well. She thought that what was happening at trial was actually more important than what was happening in school, so she pulled me out of school so I could go to the trial.

About the same time, I was reading a slightly fictionalized biography of Clarence Darrow, a famous defense lawyer from Chicago in the early 1900s. So, I’m like, I want to do some sort of civil rights thing. I didn’t really know what that meant, but from then on, I really wanted to be a lawyer. I ended up in Chicago—and in Uptown—sort of by accident. My wife and I got married at the end of college. We both really wanted to go to Ithaca. I wanted to be in Cornell’s law school and she wanted to do environmental science, but I was only waitlisted at Cornell. So we said, “All right, well, we’re into Northwestern, so I’m going to come here.”

We knew one person in Chicago, and she lived in Uptown. So we stayed with her and found an apartment a couple blocks away. My wife got involved in a political campaign on behalf of who subsequently became Alderman Helen Shiller. [Shiller] was an activist here in the neighborhood. One of the pieces of that larger pie that Helen was involved in was the Uptown People’s Law Center. By the end of my first year of law school, my wife said I should go knock on the door and see if they need any help. And they did. And I’m

still here 45 years later.

UPLC started out as a survival program modeled a er the Black Panther Party. Back when we moved to Uptown, there was a food co-op, there was an a er school program, there was a printing press, there was a college, [and there] was a legal center. When I started volunteering here [at UPLC], there weren’t lawyers on staff. It was mostly run by two people: the executive director and the receptionist, both from the community, both who’d gotten some informal legal training but who were by no means lawyers. So, it was very much part of the organizing arm. They would advise tenants as to what their rights were and then find

community-based, community organizing perspective.

When we moved to Uptown, it was a majority-poor community, and most of those poor people lived in privately owned housing. Today, neither of those things are true. It’s not a majority-poor community, and most of the poor people le live in some form of subsidized housing. I think, in many ways, it’s made the neighborhood worse. The kinds of social connections that there were when I first moved here just don’t exist anymore. You just don’t see as many people on the street hanging out together, playing with their kids, socializing on their front porches. It just doesn’t happen in this neighborhood anymore. I think the neighborhood character has really deteriorated significantly.

Our prison work in particular was started by the founders of UPLC, who firmly believed that when a person went to jail or to prison from the neighborhood, they were still part of the neighborhood

The kinds of social connections that there were when I first moved here just don’t exist anymore.

volunteer lawyers to take on stuff they couldn’t resolve informally. Over the decades, those other programs dissolved or ended or whatever happened. We’re the last people standing, really, of

and should be treated as a neighbor, rather than some other alien out there who’s in prison. And that’s how we started doing these cases—people

Alan Mills in his offi ce at UPLC ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

Alan Mills

The People’s Lawyer

Interview by SHAWN MULCAHY

Photos by Elijah Barnes

Interview by KERRY CARDOZA

Photos by Sarah Joyce

Zel Hizó, ten, is a prolifi c zinemaker, where she details her interests from Freddie Mercury to her dream dog to her favorite stuffed animals. She’s also designed T-shirts and stickers; she hawks many of her projects at zine fairs around the city, as well as at her neighborhood record store, Pinwheel Records. When she’s not putting together zines, you can find Hizó crocheting, reading manga, playing the violin, or writing movie reviews on her secret Letterboxd account. As Hizó’s mom, Alanna Zaritz, says, “It is good to diversify your skills.”

The reason why I’m mostly making zines is I just needed something to do when I’m alone or when I’m at home and I’m like, ugh [mimes being bored].

My first zine was my Freddie Mercury zine. For my school, we were doing, like, “talk about the person.” So I chose Freddie Mercury. I had a whole little board, and I also had my zine with

me. I was like, “Oh yeah, if you want some more information, you can also look at this zine too.” I ended up giving some to my classmates.

Some of the other zines I have made are my mixtape zine[s]. The mixtape zine is about a lot of my favorite songs from different bands. I draw the songs like how I think about them. So for Black Eyed Peas, “I Gotta Feeling,” I drew the four characters for the Black Eyed Peas as Animal Crossing characters. I had a difficult time doing this one, but it actually turned out pretty good. I did a “I’m Just Ken” one. It was Ken wearing horse sunglasses that were pink, obviously, and his hair was sand, [like] Malibu Beach. That was also pretty fun.

Now I have another zine, called My Dog Baguette. It’s not a real dog. It’s my dream dog. I’ve always wanted a dog, because the sad thing is that we are not allowed to have dogs in our building. So we go through this whole story of me having a dog, but at the end, I don’t have a dog. Maybe someday, once we find the right apartment.

I made one zine about all my favorite buddies [stuffed animals]. I might have to do another one because I have so many favorites. Some were gi s. But one of them we just bought at this cute

little shop when I was small. It was a frog. I am so scared to lose this guy. I named her Olympia. Inky is a little squid. Wet Boy is a watermelon. Those are names that I give them. If I get a new buddy, I always have to give them a name. I have one that’s Paprika, because my dad cooks a lot, but also it was orange and it’s a mouse.

The last thing that I made was the Frogalisa , at the Vietfive cafe. I was there with my dad, and we were eating and stuff, and I have an idea that, what if I drew Olympia—that’s my frog buddy—as the Mona Lisa? But instead I replaced the Mona with the Froga. I was like, “Dad, could you lend me your phone? I need to look at a picture of the Mona Lisa.” He was like, “OK, sure.” I was looking at all the details. I did the hair on the frog. I did the clothing, a little shawl, and all the colors. We’re gonna do those as postcards next.

The reason why I started doing art is my brain tells me to do it, or, like, I’m kind of fidgety, so I need something to use my hands with. I use clay a lot, or I just use a pen or pencil. Sometimes drawing wears me out. So I just relax my fingers for a little bit, but then I get back to work.

We go to CAKE [Chicago Alternative Comics

Expo], Zine Not Dead, Zine Fest. We go to those every year, and we just get a lot. My mom can’t stop buying stuff. We also go to Quimby’s. We love comic book stores. But my mom got me started with doing a zine. She’s like, “Hey, what if you make a zine, and you could give it to people to learn about Freddie Mercury, and you can also give it to your classmates?” So I made my Freddie Mercury zine on my iPad, [and] we printed it out. It

was pretty good. We told about where Freddie Mercury lived, and he also went to the Hall of Rock and Fame when he died. Then we had another idea to do another zine after that. So we started doing more and another one and another one. Then we started doing stuff other than zines, like my stickers and T-shirts.

If I make any other stuff, it will be sold at or just given to people at zine [fairs]. Last [year], we shared a table with our friend Oscar [Arriola] and his niece. He’s the one who started ZINEmercado. We’re gonna be sharing another table with his niece. Last time I made about 15 bucks. I’m hoping that I can make a tiny bit more—maybe some laundry money. We’re also selling them at our local record shop, Pinwheel Records in Pilsen. We’re also good friends with them. He said the Freddie Mercury zine sold out very fast. He shipped some of them across to a different area, like, I think, New York. I was like, “Oh, this is so cool.” So it’s a lot of fun.

[I’m inspired by] other artists, artwork, but mostly cartoons, because I grew up watching Adventure Time. I also read manga. I read some of that, and then I’m like, “Whoa, dude, this is so cool.” So I gotta try it. I mostly like to do bubbly stuff, because it just feels a little bit better. I do bubbly eyes, little smiley faces, and little rosy cheeks. I try to make any character look good-looking, like my dog in the Baguette thing. I took a really long time

Zel Hizó SARAH JOYCE FOR CHICAGO READER

Zel Hizó

from the neighborhood who went to prison. It’s since expanded so that we’re doing everything statewide.

The first big case we did was about access to the courts by people in solitary. That case went on for literally 18 years. We lost, and, in some ways, it’s like 18 years right down the drain. On the other hand, it turns out, if you want to do prison litigation, doing access to court cases is a great way to get your name known in the prison system. I met hundreds of people during those 18 years that were trying to get into court, and my name spread throughout the prison system, and we met

a bunch of really wonderful people. That, I think, is really the basis for all the work we’ve done.

We’ve always had a case about solitary. It’s a long-term project to say the least, which, unfortunately, is necessary. As somebody smarter than me said, “This system took 50-plus years to build. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s gonna take a while to dismantle.”

On the one hand, it’s hard. You know you’re gonna lose a lot. You’re gonna see a lot of suffering. You’re gonna see a lot of trauma. On the other hand, it’s some of the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. I have no clients who are more

grateful to our work than prisoners, because they have so few people who support them.

I was representing a prisoner who got beat the crap out of in prison. We went through a weeklong trial, and the jury came back within a half an hour and ruled against us. I thought we had a really strong case, and I was really upset. And he’s like, “You know, I’m not. I got to go on the stand and tell my story. That never happens in prison. Then the guards got on the stand, and you got to ask them questions they had to answer. We as prisoners never get to ask questions of guards. So the very fact that we went through this process was empowering.” That also helps you keep going. When you lose, you still win.

I think our biggest victory was closing the supermax prison [Tamms Correctional Center, open until 2013 in southern Illinois]. I don’t want to say that it was [because of] the lawsuit alone. In fact, it probably wasn’t even the largest part of it. There was also a lot of community organizing going on—some very creative organizing. Parents ended up being one of the main forces, at least in the early days—people whose kids were at Tamms. They formed what was called the Tamms Committee. It had some internal problems, but it really

I’m planning on stepping down as executive director. My hope is to go back to being a parttime staff attorney so I can continue to do some litigation—particularly against the prison system— but not be responsible for this place anymore. Forty-five years is a nice round number. I took over the executive director job ten years

“This system took 50-plus years to build. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s gonna take a while to dismantle.”

did highlight the issue and build solidarity among prisoners and their family members. And then it was also taken up by some of the anti-prison activists. It became a real movement in Chicago. They organized a group of photographers, and they wrote prisoners at Tamms, saying, “Tell us what you want a picture of, and we’ll send somebody out to take it and send it to you.” It was just a way to humanize people inside the prison. They also used mud to put stencils down all over Chicago. “Tamms is torture,” or something along those lines. That made some of the art bulletins and newsletters and magazines. Then there were things like takeovers of trains, which got good publicity. It was a really good, creative organizing effort, which we had nothing to do with directly. But we worked in tandem with those people. Our advantage is we had a lot of contact with people inside. Their advantage is they had a lot of energy and organizing experience.

ago, not exactly voluntarily. Our longtime former executive director died unexpectedly, and the board sort of said, “You’re the only one who can step in and do this.” And at that point, I’d done litigation for about 30 years, and I’m like, “Well, it’d be interesting to learn a new skill. That’s something that’ll be a new challenge.”

I now feel like I’ve done that. I won’t say I’m perfect at it by any means, and I’m sure if I stuck around another ten years I’d continue to learn. I certainly don’t want to take personal responsibility for the whole thing. The board had a lot to do with it. And the people who work here have a lot to do with it. And, obviously, our clients, who are willing to trust us with their lives, had a lot to do with it. But this organization is now, I think, in a stable place where somebody can make some mistakes and it won’t be disastrous. v

ELIJAH BARNES FOR CHICAGO READER

continued from p. 35

learning how to draw dachshunds, because I haven’t drawn dachshunds before, really. Like, oh, the nose looks like this. It’s long. Their legs are short. First, I kind of drew a dalmatian. But then I drew a dachshund a er.

I use an iPad and pen, pencil, markers. Sometimes I do photography.

I like to do clay stuff, because I have a dollhouse. There’s this character that I made in preschool, and her name is Bobcat Girl. We made bottle cap people in pre-K. All you need is, like, two pom poms, some little yarn thing, googly eyes, and a bottle cap. For her house, I’m like, “Something’s missing here.” So I was thinking, I have all this clay, I do sculptures. I use air-dry clay. So I make planters for her. I do food for her, because [the] downstairs area is a cafe. She lets too many cus-

tomers in there, too many spiders. [Laughs.]

I don’t do this as much as I used to, but I still make art out of clay and stuff—oh, and out of garbage. [In the future,] I might do the garbage utopia with bottles, a tower of cans. I say that you can use garbage for something, and you don’t have to just throw it away and forget about it, like, “Ope, done with that bottle.” I think everyone should do art cra s with whatever materials that they can find. Like even wood, you could do a block, just put a smiley face on it—art.

Chicago is a pretty good spot to be an artist, because it does have a lot of museums that have artworks changed. You get to see them change over time. You come back and you’re like, “Wow, new art.” v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

“I think everyone should do art crafts with whatever materials that they can find.”

“Chicago is a pretty good spot to be an artist.” SARAH JOYCE FOR CHICAGO READER

OPENING

R List for life

Every Brilliant Thing offers some quiet respite at Writers Theatre.

Seeing Writers Theatre’s current production of Every Brilliant Thing on opening night three days a er the election hit harder than it might have otherwise done. Duncan Macmillan’s 2013 solo play, which started life at the Ludlow Fringe Festival in the UK, is about literally listing the things that make life worth living. Originally performed by Jonny Donahoe (who is credited as coauthor), this is the show’s second appearance on Chicago stages, a er the Windy City Playhouse 2019 outing. It feels even more essential now.

Jessie Fisher, under Kimberly Senior’s direction, is our guide through the show’s 70 minutes, which takes place in the company’s smaller Gillian Theatre, transformed into a cozy backyard patio by set designer Izumi Inaba. Audience members (some of whom are seated onstage) are handed slips of paper to chime in with items on “the list”—created by the narrator as a young child in response to her mother’s attempt to end her own life. As she grows, we see how her mother’s depression has marked her own path through life and her own difficulties in forming close relationships. “The list” becomes a group project, added to over the years by friends.

The lighthouse at Pilot Island still stands today, although the task of keeping it has given way to automation. Thanks to the vision of the cast and creative team, led by director and ITC artistic director Stefan Roseen, Pilot Island isn’t just a piece of lost history or a single story of a time that has come and gone. Audiences are invited to escape to an immersive world that crosses the boundaries of time and emphasizes the o en otherworldly connection between the place and the people within. The attention to detail across each production element, from the whimsical score by Dominick Vincent Alesia to the chilling lighting design by Emma Luke, elevates an already captivating story. —KATIE POWERS PILOT ISLAND & HER KEEPERS Through 11/23: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, theimpostorstheatre. com, $31 reserved, $26 general admission

RHomocore to the core

Sofa King Queer is a rousing pop-punk musical.

Kevin Sparrow’s new pop-punk musical, Sofa King Queer, is raw, shaggy, sardonic, passionate, and just right for this moment. Directed by JD Caudill and featuring a young and diverse queer cast, this production by Nothing Without a Company hits a lot of the right emotional notes as it follows a group of queer friends, lovers, and family members through one day’s couplings, quarrels, and revelations.

The show doesn’t shy away from sadness and grief (and at one point, offers some helpful advice for how to frame discussions around suicide). But Fisher’s beguiling performance—aided by audience volunteers who stand in for the narrator’s dad, school therapist, college lit professor, and spouse—creates a room for us to collectively think about what lights our way when it feels like the entire world is blinding us. “We have to imagine a future that’s better than our past,” she says at one point. A tall order these days, but a good reminder that getting through it together with compassionate souls is the starting point. —KERRY REID EVERY BRILLIANT THING

Through 1/5/2025: Wed–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM; Sun 2 and 6 PM; also Wed 11/13, 11/20, and 12/11 3 PM; no show Sun 6 PM 11/17, 11/24, and 12/15; open captions Thu 11/14; Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $70

RA bright beam at Death’s Door

Pilot Island & Her Keepers tells a captivating tale about a real lighthouse.

For years, a lighthouse guided sailors across a deadly crossing in the heart of Lake Michigan. Standing on a foreboding island marked by oppressive fog, the lighthouse aided navigation for those who embarked on the Portes des Morts, or Death’s Door.

In the world premiere of Pilot Island & Her Keepers, the Impostors Theatre Company illuminates the stories of the keepers tasked with watching over the light, inspired by real events.

Playwright and ITC company member Kayla Belec’s innovative script triumphantly weaves together several narratives of the keepers who worked on Pilot Island. For some, it is a land of opportunity, while others meet it with reluctance. The lore that precedes the keepers becomes something that steers, haunts, and rouses them as they forge ahead and create their own legacies during their time on the island.

Topher (Jacob C. Watson) is a booker and manager at a rock club who lives in the venue’s basement studio. When we first meet him, he’s in bed with Granger (Marquise De’Jahn), a promoter. Topher’s former lover, a closeted Mormon boy named Brody (Aaron Cappello), is set to do a “secret show” at the club with his on-the-cusp-of-stardom band, the False Senses. Topher’s mixed feelings about both Brody and Granger as lovers also reflect his mixed feelings about taking the club in a more openly queer direction, as Granger urges.

Set in 2008 before the election of Barack Obama, the show, as Caudill notes in the program, is intended as a period piece. But the urgency of queer people claiming their space and naming their pain has never felt more important than right now, which isn’t to say that Sparrow’s show is pure conscious upli (though a few speeches do come within hailing distance of feeling a tad didactic). It’s unafraid of the messiness and conflicts within the queer community and how much harder it can be to build trust a er a lifetime of abuse both within and outside your family, depicted in part here by the story of Topher’s agoraphobic cousin, Sil (played with compelling vulnerability by Amy Delgado), and their partner Nao (Alexandra Alontaga).

Songs like “Backroom Boy/Backroom Girl,” “Daddy Dearest,” and the title track (say it fast if you don’t get the joke right away) are absolute bangers, performed by an onstage four-piece band under music director and arranger Ron Attreau (there’s an album coming out!). Both as a period piece about late-aughts homocore culture in Chicago and as a rousing cri de coeur for right now, this big-hearted show deserves an attentive audience. —KERRY REID SOFA KING QUEER Through 12/2: Thu–Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Wed 11/13 7 PM and Mon 12/2 7 PM (industry night), no show Sat 2 PM 11/16 or Thu 11/28; Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan, nothingwithoutacompany.org, $30-$60 v

Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) is a tragic love story between two men. It shows what happens when their decades-old friendship is threatened by machismo. It is, in my opinion, one of the definitive depictions of toxic masculinity in cinema, especially because it was written and directed by a woman, and even more so because May is one of the top chroniclers of flagrant chauvinism.

It was a subject top-of-mind this past week as the world was thrust yet again into another four years of darkness with Trump winning the election. When I saw A New Leaf (1971) two weekends ago at the Music Box Theatre, I was relatively hopeful (at least for a situation that didn’t involve Trump, with full acknowledgement that there was a lot left to be desired with the Democrats); after Tuesday, it felt both daunting and appropriate to be going to see Mikey and Nicky, an absolute tour de forlorn and an endurance test of despair.

The titular duo is played by Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, respectively. Many compare the film to those Cassavetes made, and while it has some similarities, I think May’s film is somehow darker and even more cognizant of the protagonist’s personal failings. Mikey and Nicky are part of a crime syndicate; Cassavetes’s Nicky is in hot water after stealing money from their boss, after which he calls Falk’s Mickey, his friend of 30 years who he’s outpaced in their gangster social circle but who still comes to his aid as he attempts to outrun the consequences of his actions.

It’s revealed early on in the course of their night together that Mikey has turned on him—routinely notifying a syndicate hit man of their location—all to get back at Nicky for leaving him behind and in an e ort to get ahead himself. Outside of the broad parallels between toxic masculinity and everything happening now, I can’t pinpoint exactly why the film evoked for me other parallels between the current situation but to say that this attitude of selfishness and the forsaking of cherished interpersonal relationships seems representative of the current issues plaguing our society (even in opposite ways, as many of those now most in support of Trump had once expressed their disdain for him).

All this also to say that I wasn’t much of a moviegoer last week, my own despair unfortunately preferring solitude to community, something I’m hoping to rectify this week. Otherwise, I watched a few things at home: Clarence Brown’s Sadie McKee (1934), starring Joan Crawford, on the Criterion Channel, and, very randomly, Stuart Gordon’s Dagon (2001), with my husband. The latter put the current situation into perspective; at least we’re not up against gold-obsessed fish people worshiping a false god. On second thought, that doesn’t feel too far o .

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

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

R READER RECOMMENDED

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

NOW PLAYING

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

First published as a short story in McCall’s magazine before being turned into a novel in 1972, the new feature film adaptation The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is the kind of feel-good, mildly Christian parable that typically gets released around the holidays.

The film—directed by Dallas Jenkins, who’s pretty much exclusively worked in Christian media to this point—stars Judy Greer and Pete Holmes alongside a cavalcade of talented kid actors. Set in an amorphous town in an amorphous time period, the movie tells the story of a much-lauded church holiday pageant that’s taken over by a rowdy group of kids with the last name Herdman. Hijinks ensue, but ultimately the whole thing comes together and everyone in town learns the true meaning of Christmas. It’s schlocky, and it’s been done about a million other times—but it’s not like you can’t say that about every Hallmark or Lifetime holiday movie, and people still love those.

The movie’s true standouts are its two young leads: Beatrice Schneider as Imogene Herdman and Molly Belle Wright as Beth Bradley. They both bring context and depth to roles that could have been played at a much more surface level, and you walk away from the movie wanting to see more from both of them.

Ultimately, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is cute, somewhat funny, and if you don’t mind having concepts like “the real Jesus” pushed at you, mostly innocuous. Don’t run out to the theater, but if you’re looking for something to watch with the family on Thanksgiving while waiting for the turkey to cook, you could do worse. —MARAH EAKIN PG, 99 min. Limited release in theaters

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point

There are two kinds of Christmas movies. First, the comedies, which seek to put a farcical spin on family togetherness, and second, the schmaltzy, Hallmark-style kind that cover everything onscreen and in the script in a sheen of fake snow and glittery glee. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is something else altogether, blending comedic elements and lingering shots of heaping piles of holiday M&Ms with the true emotional mania of a big family celebration. Directed and cowritten by Tyler Taormina, the film has a speaking cast of seemingly dozens, including producer Michael Cera, Gregg Turkington, and two famous Hollywood descendants: Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg. Set sometime in the mid 2000s, the film flits through scenes in what seems to be an Italian American family’s last holiday in their declining matriarch’s New York home.

The film doesn’t have a plot so much as it has emotional touchpoints—a mother-daughter struggle, a grown set of siblings talking about putting someone in assisted living, and notes of teenage rebellion and absurdity—but what it lacks in story it makes up for in poignancy. There are genuine moments of pathos and humor to be found within its 106-minute runtime, though they do seem to get a little more scarce in the movie’s latter half. Cera’s presence is novel amidst a cast of mostly no-names, but his actual role (as a worn-down cop who may or may not be in love with his partner) is more tossed-off nonsense than it is essential, and there are whole notes of the film that could definitely have been le on the cutting room floor. Overall, though, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is an interesting and well-made watch, albeit one that may cause anyone with an aversion to nitpicking family drama a little more agita than it might ultimately be worth. —MARAH EAKIN PG-13, 106 min. Wide release in theaters v

A still from Mikey and Nicky (1976)

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever LIONSGATE

PICK

OF THE WEEK

Las Migas share a bold rumba-tinged feminist flamenco

FRIDAY15

Wendy Eisenberg Big Bend open. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+

Wendy Eisenberg established their reputation as a chops-forward guitarist who’s equally at home in totally spontaneous and rigorously composed settings, but it’s been evident for a while that there’s more to their music than masterful shredding; They’ve also made strong statements as a singer and banjo player. This year, Eisenberg has released two recordings that fuse improvisation and songwriting without compromising either method.

The first, Accept When (Astral Spirits), is a collaboration with saxophonist Caroline Davis that distilled the duo’s disparate inspirations into a sequence of gravity-defying instrumentals and obliquely observational songs. Viewfinder, a double LP which was released this fall on American Dreams (an independent label founded here by former Chicagoan Jordan Reyes), is as expansive as its predecessor was pithy. Opening track “Lasik” relates the experience of recovering from the titular procedure, and Eisenberg sings it with a combination of languidness and agility that reminds me of Robert Wyatt. Subsequent songs conduct an unsparing, vividly articulated exploration of how life and self-perception change when one’s defenses are stripped away. But much of the album is given over to gracefully winding instrumentals, whose probing solos and dynamic changes parallel the album’s themes of transformation and self-examination without forcing any metaphors.

While Eisenberg has appeared repeatedly in Chicago as a sideperson, soloist, and collaborator, this concert is their Chicago debut as a bandleader. Their ensemble includes trombonist Zekkereya El-magharbel (who plays on Viewfinder ), drummer Ryan Sawyer, and multi-instrumentalist Mari Maurice (aka More Eaze).

—BILL MEYER

Front 242 See also Sat 11/16. Kontravoid open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out. 18+

LAS MIGAS INCORPORATE SURPRISING but unmistakable Latin American cadences into tight vocal harmonies framed by Spanish folk–inspired violin and guitar, and occasionally punctuate their songs with full-throated flamenco howls. The versatile Barcelona collective was founded in 2004 by students of the city’s prestigious Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in order to explore music that stems from flamenco. Six albums—including this year’s Latin Grammy–nominated Rumberas—and several lineup changes later, the group continues to push the boundaries of the style, often blending elements of pop and hip-hop with traditional folk sounds. Founder and sole remaining original member Marta Robles has steered the group through myriad changes, keeping their vision and spirit front and center in songs that

center a woman’s perspective.

On Rumberas, Robles, Carolina “La Chispa” Fernández, Laura Pacios, and Alicia Grillo mingle their roots from the Cataluña, Extremadura, La Mancha, and Galicia regions while exploring Cuban rumba’s influence on Spanish flamenco and folk music. Las Migas’ joyful odes to liberation and take-no-prisoners approach have drawn them an international audience, and in recent years, have made them icons of Spanish and Latin American LGBTQ+ communities. As they sing on their 2022 single “La Cantaora” (“The Singer”), featuring María Peláe (one of the few openly lesbian Spanish flamenco artists): “My song doesn’t seek redemption, nor to be submissive / Nor does it want my heart to ask for permission.”

—CATALINA MARIA JOHNSON

Front 242 is rivethead royalty, and part of the Belgian electronic group’s success can be traced to Chicago. Local cult record store Wax Trax! was founded in the mid 70s and grew into a behemoth industrial label by using a two-pronged approach: identifying and nurturing local talent, and scouting like-minded artists abroad. The former is embodied by long-running industrial-metal pioneers Ministry, whose uniquely dark synth-pop grew more fangs with each release throughout the 1980s, and the latter by Front 242—the animated visionaries who led the underground wave of the industrial subgenre that became known as electronic body music or EBM.

Like many avid crate diggers of the era, Wax Trax! founders and lovers Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher made frequent trips to Europe to experience unfamiliar punk and dance clubs. That’s where they stumbled upon Front 242’s harsh, almost militarized dance sound. The group paired the punishing leather aesthetic of macho gay clubs with a discotheque-style freedom of movement; they capitalized on a cold war sense of fatalism by incorporating samples from war movies in their music and

LAS MIGAS

Fri 11/15, 7 PM, Myron R. Szold Music & Dance Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4545 N. Lincoln, $45, $43 members. b

COURTESY THE INTERNATIONAL LATINO CULTURAL CENTER

using fog and flashing lights during shows.

While Front 242 attained modest success (by underground standards) with their 1982 debut full-length, Geography , they really broke out in 1984 after they embarked on their first U.S. tour opening for Ministry in support of their first Wax Trax! release, No Comment . For the rest of the decade, Front 242 remained the gold standard for aggressively danceable music, inspiring artists like Trent Reznor to consider how to capture profound, bleak, and raw depths of feeling with as few tools as possible. Their legacy continues to ripple in midwestern acts, including E.T., the Mall, Plack Blague, and locals like Conjunto Primitivo and Hide.

Front 242 are on their final tour, and while both Chicago performances sold out months ago, they’re saying goodbye to the city with a week of programming that includes a Wax Trax! bus tour and opportunities for face time with the

band. Liar’s Club (1665 W. Fullerton) will be transformed into Club Front 242 for nightly events starting November 12. Dark Matter Coffee Warehouse (475 N. Campbell) will present a retrospective exhibit from November 11 through November 17 and host two one-night-only events: the U.S. premiere of early industrial music documentary Body Machine Music with a Q&A featuring Front 242 on November 13, and a DJ set from the band’s Richard Jonckheere and Patrick Codenys on November 14. Don’t miss your chance to send these industrial legends off in style.

—MICCO CAPORALE

LAS MIGAS See Pick of the Week on page 40. 7 PM, Myron R. Szold Music & Dance Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4545 N. Lincoln, $45, $43 members.  b

SATURDAY16

Marcellus Pittman Father Dukes, CtrlZora, and Vitigrrl open. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 with student ID, $15–$20 in advance. 21+

Detroit techno producer and DJ Marcellus Pittman can completely alter the chemistry of a song with an understated melody. This is part of what made him such a good collaborator in 3 Chairs, a defunct Detroit supergroup that also featured Theo Parrish, Rick Wilhite, and Kenny Dixon Jr. (aka Moodymann). Pittman brings subtle flamboyance to his recent Eastside EP, released in March by Adeen. He transforms the feel of the insistent percussive thump on “You Always Hank Bank One Time” by adding sideways accents or pattern-breaking flourishes to its

sneaky, tiptoeing keyboard vamps—or by flat-out replacing them with 20 seconds of glassy oscillations. —LEOR GALIL

Front 242 See Fri 11/15. Kanga open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out. 18+

SUNDAY17

Fingy This event is billed as a “listening experience” for Fingy’s new EP. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, free with RSVP. 21+

As Fingy, Chicago producer and DJ Natalie Finfer creates a refined new setting for pop’s sugary hooks and maximalist euphoria. Her chill tracks draw from

Front 242 MOTHMEISTER

Marcellus Pittman JOE WAKEFIELD

Fingy STEVEN PIPER

Wendy Eisenberg ODELIA TODER

2/15

2/23 Ladysmith Black Mambazo

MUSIC

THURSDAY,

the same wells as deep house and neosoul. In July, she dropped “Neck Hair,” a single off the forthcoming self-released EP Forgive Me, Indefinitely, which demonstrates her seemingly magical talent for pulling you into a groove with an inviting mood. The track begins with a quiet, glassy synth that ripples like a pond disturbed by a carefully timed series of falling droplets, and those tones continue through the entire song—their gentle pace persists even as Finfer adds layers of hushed, bustling percussion and a gently palpitating bass line. New Jersey altR&B singer Bymaddz provides a sumptuous melody that connects the serene synth to the blood-stirring beat. For much of Forgive Me, Indefinitely , Finfer coaxes tranquil sounds into tense buildups without ever providing a clear cathartic release, and this lends a heightened energy even to the EP’s whispers. —LEOR GALIL

MONDAY18

Amythyst Kiah Soultru opens. 7:30 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, $15–$48. b

Johnson City, Tennessee, singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah has found passion and purpose through representation in folk and roots music for more than a decade. The Chattanooga born, selfdescribed “proud Black Appalachian” has often used her poetic guitar- and banjo-heavy songs to explore identity and find understanding, whether embracing herself as a Black queer southern artist (“Black Myself”) or coming to grips with her mother’s death by suicide (“Wild Turkey”). Her music incorporates a broad mix of influences culled from country, blues, folk, and rock, and she embeds each song with pride and pain using her soul-stirring voice.

Kiah found her musical roots in church hymns, modern rock (she’s covered songs by Radiohead and Joy Division), and explorations of America’s musical heritage and its foundation in the work of Black creators. Those interests led her to enroll in East Tennessee State University, where she earned a degree in bluegrass, old-time, and country music studies, and made her 2013 debut album Dig in the school’s recording lab. Six years later, she captured national attention as a member of Our Native Daughters alongside fellow folk heavyweights Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell. The success of their 2019 debut album, Songs of Our Native Daughters, which explores Black women’s resistance and hope in the face of racism and sexism, earned Kiah her first Grammy nomination and led to her 2021 debut at the Grand Ole Opry.

Kiah’s latest album, October’s Still + Bright

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

continues to push folk music forward. On the rock-and-bluegrass union, “I Will Not Go Down,” her finger-picking style and vocals find a perfect match in guest singer and guitarist Billy Strings, while her duet with Kentucky singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, “Play God and Destroy the World,” puts a soulful sheen on alt-country. Folk fiddle and mandolin dominate “Space,” while the fuzzed out “Die Slowly Without Complaint,” featuring vocals from Pentatonix’s Avi Kaplan, bleeds southern gothic. Punk fans will note Rancid vocalist Tim Armstrong’s pipes on “People’s Prayer,” while Butch Walker duets with Kiah on gothic love song “Silk and Petals.” Walker, who’s best known for his work with Taylor Swi and Weezer, among other artists, also produced Still + Bright, and while he tapped into her fire and spirit, she remains the keeper of the flame— and her flame burns bright.

—SELENA FRAGASSI

v

JOBS

Property Manager sought by Casapolis Ltd in Chicago, IL to manage & oversee operations, maintenance, admin and improvement of properties. Reqs Bachelor’s degree. Mst hv perm auth to wrk in US. Snd rsm & cvr lttr to 3700 N Cicero Ave, Chicago, IL 60641.

Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago d/b/a Shirley Ryan Ability Lab seeks Business & Systems Support Analysts for Chicago, IL location to analyze, model, & interpret data into useful strategies for tracking & planning monthly budgets. Bachelor’s degree in Comp Sci/Data Analytics/ related field + 2 yrs. exp. req’d. Req’d skills: data modeling; stat analysis; VBA coding; VBA programming; dashboards; SQL; pivot tables; Power

Query; predictive analytics; database mgmt.; data visualization; data collection & manipulation; data interpretation; data mining; data reporting; stat analysis; variance analysis; regressive analysis. Some telecommuting permitted. Apply online: https://www. sralab.org/careers, REQ ID JR-1062224 https:// www.sralab.org/careers, REQ ID JR-1062224

Royal Cyber Inc. in Naperville, IL. has openings for Technical Lead (Design, Develop & Manage S/W apps); Salary range $144,560.00/ Year to $145,000.00/ Year. Req. Bachelor’s or foreign equiv. + 5 yrs. of exp in the job offered or rel. Travel & relocation req’d. Mail resumes to HR Manager, Royal Cyber, Inc.,55 Shuman Blvd, Suite # 275, Naperville, IL 60563 or Email: hr.us@royalcyber.com

HOUSING

AFFORDABLE STUDIOS AVAILABLE AT IMPRINT LOFTS (7) below-market affordable STUDIO rental units available at 739 S Clark Street! Between $731 - $1516 per month based on the specific STUDIO. 40%-80% AMI! 2 occupants MAX! Please email imprint@greystar. com to schedule your tour. These STUDIOS are subject to monitoring, compliance, and other restrictions by the Department of Housing and are available on a first come, first served basis https://imprintapts. com/housing-program

Join an Intentional Community in Hyde Park/ Kenwood .The Fireplace is an inclusive Spiritual based community. The emphasis is on creativity and cooperative self-governance. We are currently seeking new residents immediately. Average cost of $1150/ month covers rent for a private room, utilities, and food. Apply at thefireplacecommunity. org Fireplace Community 773-966-4110

Veri Peri / Robyn Sin Love Dion (MIA) Jenny Fox B2B Virago and more!

WED NOV 27 / 8PM / 18+ THE O’MY’S

WITH Shawnee Dez / Frsh Waters Sparklmami / DJ Coco Nico THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

UPCOMING SHOWS

NOV 16

DAWES WITH WINNETKA BOWLING LEAGUE

NOV 15 TYCHO

FAIRGROUNDS WITH BRIJEAN

NOV 17 CARIBOU

.FAIRGROUNDS WITH YUNÈ PINKU

NOV INTERPOL

18 & 19

.FAIRGROUNDS WITH DEAFHEAVEN

NOV 22 CORY WONG .

. . . . .FAIRGROUNDS FT MIKE LETTIERI WITH COUCH

NOV 23 CAKE

NOV 24 UNDEROATH

FAIRGROUNDS

FAIRGROUNDS WITH STATIC DRESS ON SALE NOW