Chicago Reader print issue of November 21, 2024 (Vol. 54, No. 8) by Chicago Reader

THIS WEEK

FRONT

04 Readers Respond

04 Editor’s Note We’re in a “Twice the First Time” moment.

FOOD & DRINK

06 Feature The Chinese Mom Kitchen is Laura Yee’s great pop-up experiment.

07 Reader Bites Peacemaker po’boy at Daisy’s Po-Boy and Tavern

NEWS & POLITICS

08 Brown | Labor Shedd workers celebrate a successful union drive.

09 Brown-Clark | Housing A guide to renters’ rights in Chicago

ARTS & CULTURE

10 Books A new book highlights the women who bolstered Chicago’s Black classical music scene in the early 20th century.

11 Comic An exhibition of works by self-taught artist vanessa german grew out of her U. Chicago seminar.

THEATER

12 Feature Robert Lepage talks about creating a Hamlet without words.

14 Plays of Note The Comedians at Raven Theatre, Falsettos at Court, The Secret Garden at Theo, and more.

FILM

18 Reviews Colleen O’Doherty hosts Chicago Filmmakers’s Queer Writers Club.

20 Movies of Note Burgeoning love story All We Imagine as Light ﬁnds refreshing tenderness and subtlety, trans slasher ﬁlm Carnage for Christmas is a satisfying holiday treat, and more.

21 Moviegoer Experimental fantasias

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

22 Feature Closed Sessions celebrates underground rap and itself.

24 The Secret History of Chicago Music Viewﬁnder were a band out of time.

26 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Immortal Bird, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, Ten City, and J Bambii

29 Early Warnings Upcoming shows to have on your radar

30 Jobs

31 Savage Love Catching feelings for his twin brother

Undocumented , linocut on shopping bag by Carlos Barberena, 2020. Included in Show me your papers / A ver y tus papeles? at Pilsen Arts & Community House as part of GRABADOLANDIA Print Fest, November 22–24

COURTESY CARLOS BARBERENA

ON THE COVER

FREE THEM ALL , linocut by Carlos Barberena, 2024. This print was originally created in conversation with poet Raul Dorado, as part of P+NAP Think Tank, and adapted for the Reader.

“This print is to raise awareness about the humanitarian crisis caused by the family separation policy ‘zero tolerance’ during the Trump administration, and it is still a big issue with the current administration. This policy separated more than 5,000 children from their parents, keeping them in detention centers that violate their human rights. To this day, there are hundreds of children who have still not been reunited with their parents.”

More from Barberena can be found at carlosbarberena.com or on Instagram @carlosbarberena Cover pull quote by Soham Gadre in the All We Imagine as Light ﬁ lm review, p. 20.

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

CEO AND PUBLISHER SOLOMON LIEBERMAN

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES

CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN

MANAGING EDITOR SHEBA WHITE

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY

ART DIRECTOR JAMES HOSKING

PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF

GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PHOTO RESEARCHER

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

THEATER & DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

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

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

NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY

ASSOCIATE EDITOR & BRANDED CONTENT

SPECIALIST JAMIE LUDWIG

DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE

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

FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT

SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DMB (D-M BROWN)

STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE

MULTIMEDIA CONTENT PRODUCER SHAWNEE DAY

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

ASSOCIATE CHARLI RENKEN

EDITORIAL INTERN LAYLA BROWN-CLARK

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS ANN SCHOLHAMER

VICE PRESIDENT OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM

CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER BRIAN BOYER OPERATIONS ASSOCIATE LINDLEY FRENCH

CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER JIM STRUTHERS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER JOEY MANDEVILLE

DATA ASSOCIATE TATIANA PEREZ

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS CHASITY COOPER

MARKETING ASSOCIATE MAJA STACHNIK

MARKETING ASSOCIATE MICHAEL THOMPSON

MARKETING INTERN EMELLY TEOTONIO

CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER MARY EILEEN WEBER

VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES AMY MATHENY

SENIOR SALES REPRESENTATIVE LINDSAY FIGURSKI SALES REPRESENTATIVE WILL ROGERS

MEDIA SALES ASSOCIATE JILLIAN MUELLER

ADVERTISING

ADS@CHICAGOREADER.COM, 312-392-2970

CREATE A CLASSIFIED AD LISTING AT CLASSIFIEDS.CHICAGOREADER.COM

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS

DISTRIBUTIONISSUES@CHICAGOREADER.COM 312-392-2970

READER INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM, INC.

CHAIRPERSON EILEEN RHODES

TREASURER TIMO MARTINEZ

SECRETARY TORRENCE GARDNER

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

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

by Sergi Jasanada

Photo

Reader Letters m

Re: “Mamet tells us how to vote,” written by Jeﬀ Nichols and published in our November 7 issue (volume 54, number six)

Alas, Mamet got the became-a-very-richguy brain rot and now we must speak of him in the past tense. [hand waving emoji] —Whitney Wasson, via Instagram

Probably another person that hoarded resources and now has all the answers from somewhere else. Chicago has never lived up to its potential, depending on which neighborhood you’re from. —Amina Hanan, via Instagram

It’s really easy to criticize something from outside of it. It’s much harder to dig your hands into it and work to yield actual productive change. —Jack Disselhorst, via Instagram

If I might make a suggestion: David Mamet (and I say this with all due respect) can eat a bag of dicks. —Brian Hill, via Threads

Thank you! Mamet’s [commentary] was so problematic. I can’t believe the Chicago Tribune let a transplant speak for us. —Queen fLee, via Threads

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

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

EDITOR’S NOTE

Don’t drop the beat on me / Don’t drop the beat no

I am not the son of sha klak klak / I am before that / I am before I am before before before death is eternity after death is eternity There is no death there’s only eternity And I be riding on the wings of eternity like Cla cla cla sha klack klack Get me the fuck o this track

Saul Williams’s 1998 album Elohim (1972) includes his song “Twice the First Time,” which I’ve quoted above. The lyrics have a lineage: if you saw the 1998 movie Slam, in which Williams played a ﬁctionalized version of his younger self competing in 90s poetry slams, you might remember Williams’s character Ray delivering some of these lines in a monologue poem. Or perhaps you watched the documentary SlamNation, also out during that era, which showed Williams, Jessica Care Moore, and other writers who also ended up with parts in Slam competing in the real-life National Poetry Slam in Oregon. In all three renditions, Williams says “son of sha klak klak” with the staccato rhythm of chains hitting metal, words tumbling out of his mouth as though they were stacked up and lying in wait.

In this issue, we cover labor justice, bring news you can use (what are your rights as a tenant?), and, as always, attempt to faithfully chronicle the lives of the culture makers here in Chicago. Those artists, activists, organizers, and purveyors of our scenes are the people you should be looking to these days.

Inspiration will help us all, for sure, but we report on the artists for practical reasons. Artists ﬁnd meaning where the rest of us cannot. Artists have a distinct and powerful source within that brings imaginative solutions to otherwise dire circumstances.

It would be easy to fall into a state of despair with “all the stu going on in the world,” as people tend to say mindfully, generally, vaguely, anxiously, trying not to o end.

But let’s say it out loud. Unless a strange timeline of fantastical circumstances magically happens, like Godzilla taking the Atlantic shore or a reticent and swift-acting group of alien beings swooping down from space to gather some of their brethren that have been posing in human costumes (“Whoops, sorry y’all, we meant to grab this one on January 5, 2021, and then, well, you know how life gets in the way!”)—we are stuck with a rapist (see the

July 2023 Southern District of New York court ﬁling from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan if you don’t believe me) in the presidential seat and his syndicate buddies in several other important roles.

Well, we’re not stuck. We still make our own future, even if it feels like our autonomy is being taken away.

We follow in the paths of resistance and change that AfroFuturists like Williams, Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, Samuel R. Delany, Renée

Cox, Nona Hendryx, W.E.B. Du Bois, Greg Tate, Tracie Morris, and so many others have forged.

It’s not time to retreat into the cave; it’s time to gather publicly. We will have the future that we create, and it’s time for us to grab the reins and hand them back to the poets who will get us there. v

—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

No Human is Illegal, linocut on shopping bag by Carlos Barberena, 2020 COURTESY CARLOS BARBERENA

Given Sun, Taking Path

A reminder that Autumn is after Summer

Low light remains high

And it is keen to its own saunter

A reminder that this isn’t yours to keep Not borrowing on time or indebted to life

Nothing is owed and nothing is really free

To this you only change

You only ﬁnd a certain light

You only keep the time you give

Jack Colin Syron is an ambitious poet and musician. Born and raised in Chicago for 37 years, Jack is a regular traveler in the city and has made good rapport with the local food and music scene. You can check out his Chicago photography and poetry via his Instagram @jackforcegemini575.

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

A weekly series curated by the Fall Hours

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

Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM

More Light! Exhibition

Chicago design duo Luftwerk’s immersive interpretation of Aram Saroyan’s poem “lighght” transforms the Poetry Foundation gallery into a dynamic lightbox.

Open through January 11, 2025

blk: Blues Funeral for James Baldwin

Join us for an evening of music, poetry, dialogue, memory-weaving, and community gathering to honor the James Baldwin Centennial.

December 5, 2024 at 6 PM

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

FOOD & DRINK

The Chinese Mom Kitchen is Laura Yee’s great pop-up experiment

There’s joy in new challenges for the longtime food-journalist-turnedbusiness-owner.

By AMBER GIBSON

It all started back in August, when Laura Yee received an email invitation from Urban Belly to a multicourse backyard barbecue event with Aperol. She noticed that there wasn’t dessert on the menu, so she texted Chef Bill Kim, o ering to bring miso chocolate chip cookies. Her cookies were so well-received that Kim suggested she do pop-ups at the side window of Urban Belly’s Wicker Park location. That was the encouragement Yee needed to launch her fledging baking business, the Chinese Mom Kitchen. Yee had been perfecting recipes and giving away sourdough bread, milk bread, and cookies to friends for more than a year, but in a few short weeks, she scrambled with branding, packaging, and

logistics to make the pop-up a reality.

“Pulling off nine consecutive Sunday popups at Urban Belly has been the most physically challenging but the most exhilarating work I’ve ever done,” she says. “It’s given me greater appreciation of the people in food service and the commitment they bring to their craft.” Yee is a veteran food journalist and editor, most recently overseeing production for US Foods’s Food Fanatics magazine, but this is her ﬁrst foray into owning her own business.

“You can research, interview, and write about the business for the last 25 years like I have, but you don’t really know how hard it is until you do it regularly,” she says. “It’s certainly not lucrative, at least not in the be-

ginning.” Friends chipped in to help, standing on the street corner o ering samples of miso chocolate chip cookies and chili crisp crackers to passersby. Her Sunday pop-ups strategically coincided with the Wicker Park farmers’ market just down the street to glean traffic from neighborhood foodies. Yee still isn’t sure whether she made money from the nine-week endeavor, but she considers the pop-up an experiment. “It’s more about what I learned and how I can do this better.”

Figuring out how much product to make was always a challenge. After selling out one week, Yee made extra the next, only to have it languish because it was the Chicago Marathon weekend, and many potential customers had decided to stay home. “I never got it quite right,” she muses. “It might be gangbusters one week and crickets the next.”

seem to prefer chocolate chip,” Yee says. She uses white and red miso in the miso spice and miso chocolate chip cookies, with a slightly different ratio for each cookie. “Red miso tends to have a deeper, saltier flavor,” she explains. “When you put miso in the cookie batter, it’s already heavenly. And then when you bake it, it tastes totally di erent.” On the savory side, her ultra-crunchy and buttery sourdough chili crisp crackers are a hit, along with scallion pancake-inspired sourdough crackers.

“Every time it rises and it comes out of the oven, you think you’ve split atoms, and you get this great joy.”

Miso chocolate chip cookies are one of her best-selling items. She originally called them “umami chocolate chip cookies,” but after several weeks of customers asking what was in them and not understanding what the word “umami” meant, she changed the name, and suddenly, they took o .

“I love the miso spice cookie with its fresh ginger, spices, and crispy edges, but people

Yee’s love of baking stems from her childhood growing up in Boston in the 1970s with an Easy Bake Oven. “My mom was a single mom who worked three jobs to support us,” she says. Yee recalls making her mom meals that she could enjoy at home in between shifts at a Chinese restaurant and as a cocktail waitress, where she sometimes worked until 2 AM. Yee’s peach and cream cake was one of her mom’s favorites, made with yellow cake mix, canned Del Monte peaches, and Cool Whip.

“Every time it rises and it comes out of the oven, you think you’ve split atoms, and you get this great joy,” she says. Yee still feels that same joy from baking and loves sharing tangible treats with friends, family, and customers.

Preparing a batch of cheeky buns; Laura Yee with a table of homemade goods

COURTESY LAURA YEE

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

“It’s really gratifying in a way that sometimes other work is not.”

For now, Yee is baking out of her home kitchen, but her next step is looking for commercial kitchen space to expand production. She plans to be at a Chicago farmers’ market next year, and for now, she is taking orders online for local delivery and nationwide shipping.

“I’m crazy about freshness,” Yee says. “You can’t send things overnight, because it’s just too expensive.” Cookies and sourdough scallion and chili crisp crackers will be available

You know how it goes. You’re in dutch with your better half for staying out too late, drinking too many Yoo-hoos, chasing too many fireflies. There must be some kind of offering you can make to ensure your homecoming is peaceful, and that you won’t be sleeping on the couch. Something on bread . . . with beef . . . and fried seafood.

That’s merely one version of the New Orleans urban legend that’s grown up around the peacemaker, a surf and turf po’boy with as many variations as its origin story.

FOOD & DRINK

for shipping, along with a lemon verbena peach jam that she makes with Mick Klug Farms peaches and lemon verbena from her own yard. More perishable treats like pineapple buns, cheeky furikake buns, sourdough, and milk bread are only available for local delivery and pickup. Follow along on Instagram @thechinesemomkitchen to learn about upcoming pop-up events at Urban Belly this holiday season. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

than a typically sloppy debris po’boy. That’s also because, after arduous research on the ground in the Big Easy, Williams chose to build his with hard-fried oysters.

“We ate some amazing peacemakers made with oysters,” he says. “That style stood out to us most. We could have done shrimp, but I liked the texture of oysters more.”

Me too. On a couple occasions at Daisy’s, I asked for a regular beef po’boy topped with fried shrimp. This ad hoc version has a nice snap that unfortunately tends to disintegrate the whole affair—and perhaps your own fragile situationship.

On Williams’s peacemaker, boarded on NOLA’s Leidenheimer baguettes, the bivalves’ crunch yields to their briny, lush softness but also helps keep the veg from slipping overboard in a sloppy mayo slide.

Typically it has that rich debris, the slurry of juices and beefy bits that fall from a roast, bedded on a ﬂu y, crackly baguette, with shredded lettuce, tomato, pickles, mayo, and either fried shrimp or oysters—a sandwich that gives new meaning to the term “marital aid.”

Just around the corner from Erick Williams’s Virtue, Daisy’s, his NOLA-inspired sports bar, o ers a peacemaker that seems like a capable bedroom diplomat.

With shaved beef and a restrained application of gravy, it holds its form better

Splash some tangy Crystal cayenne magic on the proceedings and you have a proper olive branch, available in six or 12 inches, depending on the seriousness of your offenses. —MIKE SULA DAISY’S

PO-BOY AND TAVERN 5215 S. Harper St., sixinch $15.99, 12-inch $29.99, 773-675-8767, daisyspoboychicago.com v

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

No one should have to pay to know what’s going on in their city

Donate to the Reader

cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio

Peacemaker po’boy at Daisy’s Po-Boy and Tavern

NEWS & POLITICS

Shedd workers approve union

Aquarium staﬀ join a burgeoning labor movement among Chicago’s cultural workers.

By DMB (D-M BROWN)

For Rachel Berey-Wingate, working at Shedd Aquarium is easy to love but hard to maintain—especially without a union.

“Shedd Aquarium tends to draw in a passionate workforce: people who care deeply about the animals, conservation, and public education,” she says. “But that can also lead to employers taking advantage of that passion.”

The 24-year-old started their aquarium employment two and a half years ago, making $15.40 an hour in guest relations. She balanced her job at Shedd with a second job as a Chicago River tour guide—usually working 50 hours a week.

Six months ago, Berey-Wingate took a fulltime job on the public engagement team directing activities like behind-the-scenes tours and “animal chats.” Their wage increased to $20 an hour. Because of the raise, she can survive o of one job. But Berey-Wingate is only eligible to stay on her parents’ health insurance plan for one more year, and she worries what will happen when she has to pay for it herself. “I also live in a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates and lead paint in the walls, so that’s where I’m at.”

Berey-Wingate is one of 180 Shedd employees now represented by Shedd Workers United and the American Federation of State, County, and

Employees decry abysmal wages and high employee turnover. The starting wage for guest relations sta is $17 an hour and public engagement facilitators, like Berey-Wingate, make $20. Bilingual facilitators are not paid extra for translating services. Even wages for animal care specialists—who work directly with penguins, whales, and dolphins—start at $23 an hour. (In comparison, an entry-level zookeeper at the unionized Lincoln Park Zoo makes $29 an hour.) Meanwhile, Bridget C. Coughlin, the aquarium’s CEO, earned more than $700,000 in salary and beneﬁts in 2022, according to the aquarium’s tax ﬁlings.

After eight years of working with aquatic creatures at Shedd, Michelle Nastasowski makes $28 an hour. She’s married, has two kids, and works full-time. She says the only reason she can afford to remain at Shedd is because her husband makes $10 an hour more than her doing maintenance. He is also a U.S. Marine veteran with PTSD whose disability payments total more than her salary.

Employees describe a laundry list of antiunion activities during their 18-month campaign. Management told workers they couldn’t hang pro-union ﬂyers or even discuss union matters at work. Garcia and others also say they received anti-union emails from management.

“That was extremely disheartening for me,” Garcia says, “and what it showed me, really, was if we aren’t together as workers, then top leadership isn’t going to listen to us at all.”

Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, after 75 percent of workers voted “yes” to forming a union on November 2. It capped o a yearlong anti-union campaign from management that spurred charges of labor law violations.

Shedd Aquarium is the ninth Chicago-area cultural institution to unionize with AFSCME Council 31 in the past three years. Now that they’ve won the union vote, members have set their sights on negotiating their ﬁrst contract with Shedd leadership.

The freshly unionized workers include 110 employees in guest relations, 50 in learning and community, and 15 in development and marketing. Some portion of workers are not yet unionized—like those in the animal care department—but are on track for a union vote soon.

In a press release announcing the win, the Shedd Workers United organizing committee said, “Shedd is an institution focused on sustainability for marine life. Together in our union, we can ensure an equal focus on making it a sustainable place to work.”

Johnny Ford, a Shedd spokesperson, tells the Reader in a written statement that the aquarium “commends its sta for navigating this unionization process with grace and respect” and will work “collaboratively with union representatives to outline the terms and conditions of employment.”

After the onset of COVID-19, the aquarium introduced a new policy that workers are no longer eligible for health insurance if they can be covered under their spouse’s policy. But Nastasowski says her husband’s health insurance is not the best quality and his VA beneﬁts are also poor compared to what Shedd would o er.

Nastasowski is part of the nonunionized portion of employees, but she’s eager for their union campaign to also culminate with a “yes” vote. “In the eight years that I’ve been there, I have seen a myriad of di erent working conditions,” she says. “I would like to see an agreement that both management and the sta can come to that’s protected.”

Kirby Garcia is the only hourly paid worker in the marketing department. After ﬁve years with the aquarium, they now make $24 an hour. Garcia also drives for Uber and DoorDash on the weekends.

“The cost of groceries has been crazy for a long time,” they say. “My rent keeps going up every year. I noticed pretty early on that my raises weren’t keeping up with inﬂation. And as far as I’m concerned, if my raise doesn’t keep up with inﬂation, then it’s a pay cut.”

Garcia was on Medicaid when they started working at Shedd, and they jumped at the opportunity to enroll in beneﬁts through the aquarium. “But now that I was paying for insurance, and I didn’t have Medicaid, and I didn’t qualify for SNAP anymore, I was actually coming out with less money at the end of the month.”

In September, the union charged Shedd with violating federal labor law. The union claims management told workers that the aquarium’s policy against workplace solicitation barred them from talking about their union or asking others to sign union cards while at work. But they say that policy was not enforced if, for example, workers wanted to sell Girl Scout cookies or invite coworkers to a comedy show. The charge is still pending before the National Labor Relations Board, records show. Ford, the Shedd spokesperson, calls the union’s allegations “inaccurate and misleading.” He writes in a statement that “Shedd has a long history of honest, robust and bidirectional employee relations and communications – values we continue to hold ourselves to as this process continues.”

Nastasowski and Garcia are both hopeful and excited for the future. Shedd joins eight other local cultural institutions that have unionized with AFSCME Council 31 in recent years, including sta at the Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute, the Newberry Library, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Anders Lindall, an AFSCME spokesperson, says these victories represent the raising up of an entire sector of workers who have been taken for granted for too long. “They have been told, ‘You are just fortunate to be in proximity to these great institutions. You’re lucky to work here. There’s a line out the door of people that will take your job and, therefore, you should be willing to swallow not having health insurance or having to DoorDash because you don’t make enough money.’”

Berey-Wingate wants workers who hear about their win to understand that unionizing is possible. “People shouldn’t be putting up with injustice at their workplace, even if— especially if—it’s a workplace that they care deeply about. Right? Work situations can get better.” v

Do you rent an apartment in the city?

The Chicago Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance (RLTO), ﬁrst approved in 1986, outlines the legal rights and responsibilities for landlords and tenants.

What does the RLTO apply to?

The ordinance applies to most rental properties located in Chicago, including units operated under subsidy programs from the Chicago Housing Authority and the Illinois Housing Development Authority. Notable exceptions to the RLTO include units in owner-occupied buildings with six or fewer units and most units in hotels and motels, dorms, and shelters.

Cook County has its own version of the RLTO, which applies to apartments, including mobile homes and subsidized units, in suburban Cook County. It does not apply to units in Chicago, Evanston, or Mount Prospect.

Chicago’s ordinance requires that a summary copy be given to prospective tenants. It should be attached to written lease agreements or given to tenants with oral rental agreements.

What are the tenant’s rights and duties under the RLTO?

Tenants are responsible for testing and installing batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, notifying building owners in writing of maintenance needs, and keeping the unit safe and clean.

HOUSING

Renter’s rights

Your guide to Chicago’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance

By LAYLA BROWN-CLARK

of the property owner or manager’s name, address, and telephone number; alert tenants in writing to impending foreclosure proceedings; tell tenants about any code violations that occurred within the last year; and generally maintain the rental property.

Landlords must also give two days’ notice that they plan to enter your unit for maintenance, except in cases of emergency.

If your landlord fails to respond to a maintenance request within 14 days, you can withhold money from your rent payment that “reasonably reﬂects the reduced value of the unit,” beginning on the 15th day and continuing until repairs are completed. You can also have the repairs completed yourself and deduct up to $500 from that month’s rent or ﬁle a lawsuit in court.

You have the right to terminate your lease

at the end of the 14-day period when a serious issue renders your unit uninhabitable. In these cases, your landlord must return any prepaid rent and security deposits plus interest. In cases of ﬁre, tenants can move out immediately, provided they notify the landlord within 14 days, or stay in the unit with reduced rent.

If a tenant wishes to move prior to the end of a lease, the landlord must make an e ort to ﬁnd a new tenant at a fair rent. But tenants are ultimately responsible for rent and the land-

lord’s cost of advertising.

Tenants should not change the locks on their units without ﬁrst notifying their landlord. If they do change the locks, tenants are required to provide their landlord with a new key.

What are the landlord’s rights and duties under the RLTO?

Landlords are required to inform tenants

If you’ve lived in your apartment for fewer than six months, your landlord must give 30 days’ notice before they terminate month-to-month tenancy, decline to renew your lease, or raise your rent. If you’ve lived in your home between six months and three years, your landlord is required to provide 60 days’ notice. And tenants who’ve lived in a unit for longer than three years are guaranteed 120 days’ notice under the RLTO. At the end of your lease, your landlord is required to provide an itemized statement of any damages before deducting money from your security deposit. Any remaining portion of the security deposit and accrued interest must be returned within 45 days of moving out or within seven days in the event of a ﬁre.

Landlords may charge a monthly late fee of $10 on rents under $500, plus an additional 5 percent per month on the part of rent that exceeds $500. Before terminating a lease for failure to pay rent, property owners must notify tenants in writing and give them five days to pay back any rent. You cannot be evicted without a court order or if your landlord accepts any form of late rent payment. Your lease can only be terminated for purported violations after your landlord has notified you in writing of the specific actions that violated city law or the rental agreement and given you ten days to remedy the situation. It’s also illegal for landlords to lock out tenants under any circumstance. Landlords are subject to fines between $200 and $500 for each day a lockout continues. v

Miniatures by Margie Criner and Itty Bitty Mini Mart JAMES HOSKING

ARTS & CULTURE

BOOKS

RSOUTH SIDE IMPRESARIOS: HOW RACE WOMEN TRANSFORMED CHICAGO’S CLASSICAL MUSIC SCENE by Samantha Ege

University of Illinois Press, paperback, 296 pp., $24.95, press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p088339

The women who made Florence Price

Samantha Ege’s South Side Impresarios reminds us that no woman is an island.

By HANNAH EDGAR

Classical music, like so many art forms, requires two conditions: a steady ﬂow of capital and preserving belief in the existence of singular, anachronistic genius. As scholar-pianist Samantha Ege makes clear in South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene, Florence Price is no exception. Price is now widely recognized as the first Black woman to have had a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, at a 1933 Chicago Symphony concert associated with that year’s World’s Fair. (Twenty-yearold Margaret Bonds, who would become a wellknown composer in her own right, performed as the evening’s soloist.) While predominantly white musical institutions have opted for a tidy narrative of “rediscovery,” in truth, Price’s legacy has always been safeguarded locally and among the Black musical cognoscenti. A public school at 44th and Drexel bore her name from 1964 until 2012, when it became a casualty of the Rahmera school closures. Her music has been recorded since at least the 1980s; an ensemble associated with the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago recorded her Symphony No. 1 in E minor as long ago as 2011, the same year Florence B. Price Elementary was condemned to closure. But South Side Impresarios stresses Price and her peers—like Bonds and Nora Holt, a music critic and impresario who became the first African American in the country to receive a master’s degree in music—were almost certainly not the only composers of their race, gender, and time with the ability and aspiration to write symphonic music. “I reject a reading of [Price’s] path that ﬁxates on her exceptionalism,” Ege writes. Price and others were, however, lucky

enough to be championed by an influential community of upper- and upper-middle-class south-siders who rallied around them and their music. In Chicago, that impresario class was, uniquely, dominated by women. This was a milieu where a woman (Marjorie Stewart Joyner, a businesswoman and longtime Bud Billiken Parade organizer) could have a fighting chance to be elected “mayor” of Bronzeville in 1936, in the neighborhood’s honorary elections. Ege makes it clear that these “Race women”—Ege uses the contemporaneous term to capture their elite status and social goals—were as essential to Price, Bonds, and Holt’s productivity as the Esterházys were to Haydn or Nadezhda von Meck was to Tchaikovsky. Sometimes it was through fundraising muscle; sometimes it was as profound as o ering housing and companionship, as Bonds’s family did to Price and her children after she escaped an unhappy marriage.

Chicago’s “Race women” offered an alternative to white institutional support for Black art, which was nonexistent, fleeting, or excruciatingly double-edged.

Chicago’s “Race women” offered an alternative to white institutional support for Black art, which was nonexistent, fleeting, or excruciatingly double-edged. For all the ink spilled about the Chicago Symphony’s 1933 concert, Ege reminds readers that it opened with an overture by John Powell, a white supremacist who influenced the passage of a statute outlawing interracial marriage in Virginia. (The law wouldn’t be overturned until the passage of Loving v. Virginia in 1967. That story, by the way, is being adapted into an opera this spring by the Chicago-based composer Damien Geter.)

That these “Race women” have not been given their due illuminates how quickly a Price hagiography is being crafted before our very eyes, like so many composers before her. Until now, little (written) credit has been a orded

the patron who underwrote that 1933 Chicago Symphony concert: Maude Roberts George. A retired soprano, George succeeded Holt both as staff music critic of the Defender and as the chair of the National Association of Negro Musicians—an organization whose inaugural convention was held, impossibly, during the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. Both women used those posts to rally community support for Black classical artists in Chicago and beyond. Ege imagines Holt may have been the one who introduced Price to her south-side base, perhaps even responding to Holt’s open invitation to her home via her Defender columns.

A word before you read: South Side Impresarios is an academic text. Ege’s book levies a social analysis, rather than attempting a narrative biography. (For that, try instead the late Rae Linda Brown’s The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price , published in 2020 by the same press.)

That’s despite Ege’s obvious knack for potent, vivifying description, which blooms in the book’s introduction and conclusion but mostly peters out in its main body. Her introduction transports us to the 1933 World’s Fair concert, then to her own trip to the Chicago Symphony, 84 years later. There, she describes, with fond acuity, the Chicago women who carry the torch Price, Bonds, Holt, George, and others ignited all those years ago: composers Renée C. Baker, Regina Harris Baiocchi, and Jessie Montgomery, the last of whom became only the second Black woman to have her music played by the Chicago Symphony while in residence at the orchestra from 2021 to 2024; Chicago Symphony African American Network (AAN) founder Sheila Anne Dawson-Jones; and AAN ambassador

and music critic Barbara Wright-Pryor. Ege’s conclusion is cast as a heartfelt second-person address to Maude Roberts George herself, musing on her life and legacy. The effect is so immediate that when Ege reveals the brutal reality of George’s final years—she suffered a nearly fatal bullet wound in her own home, under circumstances that remain foggy—the reader, too, feels their feet swept out from under them.

But Ege’s general disinclination toward a narrative mode feels like a missed opportunity. Resisting hagiography also means emphasizing the humanity of great individuals; South Side Impresarios readers will leave with a comprehensive account of the networks and circumstances that made these composers’ rise possible but not necessarily with any stronger sense of them as people.

Ege beautifully renders the few exceptions to that rule. One which still sticks is her telling of a 1971 interview with Bonds, in which the composer, by then very ill, recalls Black musicians gathering to help copy out instrumental parts for Price on short notice. Why? Bonds apparently crumbles into laughter on this point in the recorded interview: “She seemed to procrastinate.”

Yes, the thought that even the great Florence Price blew a deadline once in a while is humbling. More than that, though, the scene presents a different, more communal vision of philanthropy. It’s a vision underrated in classical music’s past but almost certainly necessary for its future survival: many hands of many colors lifting in unison, rather than the white and white-gloved few. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

THEATER

Robert Lepage talks about creating Hamlet without words

The acclaimed director’s collaboration with choreographer Guillaume Côté comes to the Harris Theater.

By KERRY REID

Shakespeare’s brooding Danish prince has never been far away from stages around the world. But in Chicago, we’ve seen some innovative reimaginings of Hamlet in 2024. Eddie Izzard’s one-person interpretation played at Chicago Shakespeare in April, Red Theater offered a stripped-down take on the text in May, and the New York Circus Project’s physical interpretation hit the Studebaker in August.

Now, internationally renowned French Canadian director Robert Lepage comes to town with The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, a piece he created in collaboration with choreographer Guillaume Côté, who performs the title role. The show, which premiered at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre in early April, makes its U.S. debut at the Harris Theater on November 23 and 24.

Lepage, whose lengthy résumé stretches back over 40 years in theater, ﬁlm, opera, and circus—and whose use of new technologies

THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET: PRINCE OF DENMARK Sat 11/23 7: 30 PM, Sun 11/24 1 and 6: 30 PM; Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334 -7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $ 58 -$168

visual framework provided by Lepage’s vision. Afterward, notes Lepage, Côté told him, “I’m gonna turn 40 soon, and I think I’m gonna be past my prime to do Hamlet.”

Shakespeare as the inspiration for dance is not new, of course: the Shakespeare and Dance Project lists 16 versions of Hamlet alone stretching back to 1788. But for Lepage, the challenge of telling Shakespeare’s story without text was irresistible. He also notes the project began life during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, which meant there was a lot of time to work with Côté and dancers from Côté Danse, the company Côté formed in 2021

“It’s a braid of the classical, the contemporary, and the street dance. By developing that, it created all these amazing situations and characters” that gave the dancers a lot to work with dramatically. With a laugh, Lepage notes when they did a workshop at a small theater in Montreal, “I had some people congratulating me on how I had found some great actors who knew how to dance.

“It’s a very different approach for a lot of the dancers. They’re used to conveying traits of character or action in a dance fashion. But I took a lot of time reading passages and lines [from the play], which a lot of choreographers don’t do. I really said [to Côté], ‘If you want me to do this with you, you do the choreography, I’ll intervene into it and try to feed all of the complex ideas.”

in performance has long been a hallmark of his work—tells me in a phone conversation a few weeks ago he has directed the play several times in the past and even played Hamlet at one point.

“I think I know and have a command of the piece. But then at one point, you go, ‘OK, I’ve staged it enough. I think I pretty much know what the whole thing’s about.’ And you kind of get bored and move on to other stu . But I started working with Côté, who’s the star dancer of the National Ballet of Canada. We got to do a project a few years ago, based on the biography of a ﬁlm animator from the 40s and 50s—a Canadian guy called Norman McLaren.” (McLaren, who was born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada, was particularly inﬂuential for his advancements in synchronizing animation with music.)

That 2018 piece, Frame by Frame, premiered at the National Ballet of Canada in 2018 and won widespread acclaim, particularly for the

to explore forms outside ballet.

Lepage describes the makeup of artists in those initial workshops as “old chums from the classical world but also a lot of contemporary dancers and a few street dancers,

“There’s a lot of action, there’s a lot of muscle, there’s a lot of passion going on.”

and there’s even a guy that was krumping.”

In thinking about the class dynamics in the original play, where, as Lepage notes, “[Shakespeare] doesn’t make the king and queen speak in the same language as the gravedigger or the clowns,” it became apparent removing the words would allow the story to explore those dynamics through what Lepage calls “the hierarchy of dance.”

Lepage observes, “The thing that’s interesting is that Hamlet’s profound paradox is action versus nonaction, right? Because he complains all the time, ‘Why is it I have all the motivation to take action, but I don’t take action?’ Suddenly with dance, there are very interesting ways of conveying that and incarnating that paradox.”

I ask Lepage whether he thinks there’s any particular significance to the uptick in new interpretations of Hamlet, such as Izzard’s show. “I won’t have any kind of intelligent answer to give you, but I think it’s probably a sign of something,” he says. “Certainly with what’s going on in the U.S. right now with Trump and the resurgence of extreme-right dictators. The political thing is very embedded in a lot of the Shakespeare dramas, and you would find clues of that in Hamlet for sure.”

The piece has been evolving through subsequent performances, including one at a Shakespeare festival in Romania. But the essence of the original story remains.

“That’s what’s so great about Shakespeare plays. You remove the words, and you’re not necessarily depriving the story of a lot of stuff,” says Lepage. “Everything’s already in there—the skeleton of it. There’s a lot of action, there’s a lot of muscle, there’s a lot of passion going on.” v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

Robert Lepage (L) and Guillaume C ôté; a scene from The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark FRANÇOIS LATULIPPE/STÉPHANE BOURGEOIS

THEATER

OPENING

R Stand-up love story

The Comedians traces the rise and fall of a relationship through club sets.

Philip Dawkins’s The Comedians started out as an audio play through Audible, but now it’s totally live at Raven Theatre for a short run under the direction of Colm Summers. Told almost entirely through stand-up sets by middle-aged Jewish Chauncy (Bill Larkin) and young Congolese American Nsaku (Terry Guest), the script follows their relationship from start to ﬁnish, through Chauncy’s professional insecurities and Nsaku’s growing problems with substance abuse, even as his career takes oﬀ.

The conceit works pretty well: comedians oversharing in pursuit of laughs is definitely a thing, and one of the strengths of Dawkins’s script is how we see these two men—each wounded in different ways and struggling to find acceptance on- and offstage—try to find solace and strength in the other. And even if you don’t completely buy the premise, the performances are so layered and charismatic that it hardly matters. (Raven also has an opening set from a local comedian at

each performance, with Manny Petty doing the honors the night I attended.) Larkin’s neuroses and hangdog attitude reminded me of Richard Lewis (particularly his disquisition on “As a culture, I think we don’t give up enough”) and Guest’s cheery bonhomie contrasts uneasily with the pain we can all see bubbling up behind it.

The Comedians, much like Andrew Hinderaker’s Obliteration at Gi Theatre earlier this year, asks us to consider comedy as a tool of emotional deﬂection and connection. Thanks to Larkin and Guest’s gutsy performances, it’s a largely absorbing and sometimes very insightful endeavor. —KERRY REID THE COMEDIANS

Through 11/24: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-3382177, raventheatre.com, $65 (cabaret seating $100)

Not quite seaworthy

Dames at Sea has great dancers, but the story sags.

This 1966 parody of 1930s Busby Berkeley–style movie musicals is so sweet and light it makes Mel Brooks’s parodies look profound. The story is pure Hollywood ﬂuﬀ— bright-eyed girl from the sticks (in this case Utah) comes to bad old New York, New York, to make it on Broadway. And she does, a er a few predictable twists. The tunes

(book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller, music by Jim Wise) are clever send-ups of 1920s and 1930s tunes (“That Mister Man of Mine” for “The Man I Love,” “Good Times Are Here to Stay” for “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and so on). No wonder this show continues to be produced 58 years a er it opened off-offBroadway at the legendary Caffe Cino (with subsequent, noteworthy off-Broadway and Broadway productions).

Not all of the charm of Dames at Sea is apparent in Citadel Theatre’s unevenly cast, unpolished production. Some of the performances are great. Ciara Jarvis plays Mona, the show’s B-word diva, with just the right dash of Barbara Stanwyck hardness. Melody Rowland shines and shines as the Ruby Keeler-ish new kid on the block (named Ruby, in fact), just a stage mishap away from “going out there a kid and coming back a star.” But too many of the supporting performers lack Jarvis and Rowland’s energy, comic timing, and stage presence to make this show soar. It is thrilling that director and choreographer Gregg Dennhardt was able to ﬁll the show with so many fabulous top dancers. Too bad parodies can’t live on tap alone. —JACK HELBIG DAMES AT SEA

Through 12/15: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 11/27 and 12/11 1 PM; no shows Thu 11/28 and 12/12; Citadel Theatre, 300 S. Waukegan, Lake Forest, 847-735-8554, ext. 1, citadeltheatre.org, $45

RFalsettos hits all the right notes

Court and TimeLine partner for a vibrant and touching revival of the AIDS-era musical.

When I saw the national tour of Falsettos ﬁve years ago, I struggled to connect with the material. The complex family dynamics, quirky humor, and fast-paced lyrics of William Finn and James Lapine’s sung-through musical simply didn’t translate across the depths of the Nederlander Theatre.

Fortunately, I had a much better experience at Court Theatre’s new revival, coproduced with TimeLine Theatre Company and directed by Nick Bowling. In a smaller space, the seven characters are vibrant, funny, and touching in this tale about found family, coming out, coming of age, and the AIDS epidemic.

Originally written as two separate one-act musicals (1981’s March of the Falsettos and 1990’s Falsettoland), the full-length version of Falsettos premiered in 1992. In the ﬁrst act, a Jewish family in 1979 New York City navigates its newly blended status. Middle-aged patriarch Marvin (Stephen Schellhardt) has le his marriage for a younger man, Whizzer (Jack Ball), and is trying to maintain a relationship with his preteen son, Jason (Charlie Long on opening night), and stay on cordial terms with

Falsettos MICHAEL BROSILOW

his ex-wife, Trina (Sarah Bockel).

Further complicating matters—not to mention blurring professional ethics—Mendel (Jackson Evans), the psychiatrist who treats the entire family, soon marries Trina. The second act picks up two years later and introduces their friendly lesbian neighbors, Dr. Charlotte (Sharriese Hamilton) and Cordelia (Elizabeth Stenholt), while the comedic plot takes a somber turn. With music direction by recent Northwestern graduate Otto Vogel and movement direction by William Carlos Angulo, Bowling’s cast hits the right notes in this oddball of a tearjerker. —EMILY MCCLANATHAN FALSETTOS

Through 12/8: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; no shows Wed-Thu 11/27-11/28; ASL interpretation Sat 12/7 2 PM; Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $15-$93.50

RThe Little Mermaid makes a splash at Drury Lane

Sawyer Smith’s Ursula is a standout in a ﬁn-tastic show.

For many, myself included, the vibrant colors of Disney’s 1989 ﬁlm version of The Little Mermaid were electrifying. In Drury Lane Theatre’s production of the story of Ariel (Sarah Kay), who gives up her voice to ﬁnd her true love Eric (Patrick Johnson), that vibrancy is just as alive and well. This enchanting production will have you hooked— with one performance in particular.

“Finally someone did Ursula some justice,” was all I could think the moment Sawyer Smith came to the stage as the beloved sea witch. Surrounded by actors as their giant tentacles, Smith was absolutely divine in this role they were clearly born to play. If you take away nothing else from this show, you’re certain never to forget Smith’s vocal power or their embodiment of the iconic Disney villain.

The other main star of this show is the high-fashion costume work by Ryan Park and Zhang Yu. Their impeccable designs elevate this show to a whole new level and take Ursula’s visage from costume to couture.

When it comes to Broadway, few can do it better than Disney—though even the Mouse gets it wrong sometimes. Historically, The Little Mermaid was one of the company’s least successful Broadway endeavors with some less-than-magical additional songs. But despite its structural ﬂaws, it’s still a ﬁn-tastic way to spend an evening. A er all, when the human world is a mess, sometimes you need a little time under the sea.

—AMANDA FINN THE LITTLE MERMAID Through 1/12/25: Wed 1:30 PM, Thu 1:30 and 7 PM, Fri 7 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM; also Wed 11/27 7 PM, Thu 11/28 3 PM only, Mon 12/23 3 PM, Tue 12/31 8 PM, Wed 1/1 1 and 5:30 PM; no show Wed 12/25 or Thu 1/2 7 PM; Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace, 630-530-0111, drurylanetheatre. com, $65-$125

RThe Secret Garden blooms at Theo

The musical version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel feels joyous and timely.

I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden six decades a er its publication, but the story—a “diﬃcult” ten-year-old girl who deals with unbearable sadness by using paganesque incantations to unleash the healing power of the earth itself—resonated strongly. Theo’s solid staging of the novel’s musical adaptation (book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, score by Lucy Simon) reveals a tale that remains timeless.

THEATER

Directed by Christopher Pazdernik with musical direction by Carolyn Brady, the plot begins with the cholera outbreak that orphans Mary Lennox (Joryhebel Ginorio), her household collapsing in a whirl of bloodred scarves in Nich O’Neil’s evocative choreography. Mary is sent to live with her emotionally distant uncle, Archibald (Will Koski), his villainous brother Neville (Jeffrey Charles), and Archibald’s sickly son, Colin (Kailey Azure Green). It falls to housekeeper Martha (Dakota Hughes) and her son Dickon (Lincoln J. Skoien) to restore a sense of joy in Mary, whose recovery forever changes the lives of her surviving relatives.

The production is mildly miscast: Ginorio’s Mary sounds great and captures the character’s ﬁlter-free bluntness, but she reads far closer to 20 than ten on stage. Koski’s Archibald has an extraordinarily powerful voice, but he’s serving boyish charm when Heathcliﬀ levels of brooding are required.

That doesn’t matter when the cast is in song. Soaring case in point: “Hold On,” anchored by Hughes’s galvanic insistence:

“When you see a man who’s ragin’ / And he’s jealous and he fears / That you’ve walked through walls / He’s hid behind for years / What you do then is you tell yourself / To wait it out and say / ‘It’s this day, not me / That’s bound to go away.’”

Easier sung than done, but those are words to live by regardless, and they are powerfully delivered in Theo’s joyful production. —CATEY SULLIVAN THE SECRET GARDEN Through 12/22: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 6 PM; no show Thu 11/28; Howard Street Theater, 721 Howard, Evanston, 773-939-4101, theo-u. com, $45-$60

R Sexy Merry Men

Throbbin Wood gives a naughty panto twist to Sherwood Forest.

For anyone missing The Buttcracker burlesque, which is sadly on hiatus this year, I’d suggest a visit to PrideArts to spice up your holiday theatergoing. With less bare skin and more ribald rhymes and phallic puns, Throbbin Wood is an adult take on the British theatrical tradition of pantomime, or panto.

Across the pond, pantos are silly, family-friendly retellings of fairy or folk tales, with plenty of slapstick comedy and audience participation. For the third consecutive year, PrideArts oﬀers a similarly raucous experience, but instead of merely booing and hissing at the villain, viewers are invited to shout less printable greetings at characters such as Nanny Fanny (Neill Kelly) and Silly Willy (Freddy Mauricio).

Directed by Taylor Pasche, Throbbin Wood follows the eponymous hero (Bryan Fowler) and his band of Merry Men (Jackson Anderson, Jack Gordon, and Kyle Johnson) as they try to rescue Maid Marian (Emma Robie) from the Sheriﬀ of Frottingham (the delightfully wicked Ryder Dean McDaniel) with some magical help from Fairy Glitter-ous (Danielle Bahn). Tom Whalley’s saucy script is peppered with covers of artists such as Chappell Roan and TikTok sensation Jane Bell, with music direction by Chad Gearig and choreography by Jen Cupani.

If an abundance of codpieces, references to King Dick (McDaniel), and sex toy–inspired choreography sounds like your idea of a good time, then get thee to Frottingham. —EMILY MCCLANATHAN THROBBIN

WOOD Through 12/18: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; no shows 11/25-11/29; PrideArts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 773-857-0222, pridearts.org, $35 (seniors/students $30) v

Help provide housing and other support for Illinois Veterans with your purchase of a 7X Bingo Multiplier Instant Ticket from the Illinois Lottery

In 2006 the Illinois Lottery launched the first Instant Lottery ticket in the country that designated 100 percent of its profits toward organizations that support veterans in Illinois. Working with the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs (IDVA), the Illinois Lottery has raised over $23 million to fund the Veterans Cash program that has awarded grants to more than 400 Veteran support organizations to date. These groups provide various essential services, including housing assistance, long-term care, disability benefits, employment services, food and clothing pantries, and treatment for post-traumatic stress to the more than half million veterans who live in the state of Illinois. In 2024, the Illinois Lottery introduced a new joint specialty ticket where a portion of the profits raised go toward ten worthy causes, including veterans support programs in Illinois. Just in time for the holiday season, the 7X Bingo Multiplier Instant Ticket, which has a fun, bright green color, costs $5 and is available for purchase at more than 7,000 Illinois Lottery retailers throughout the state. Visit the Illinois Lottery website for more information, and read on to learn about the Central Illinois Veterans Commission (CIVC), which supports honorable and general discharged veterans in their journey toward a permanent home.

The value of having a safe and secure place to call home cannot be overstated. For individuals and families, stable housing is associated with greater physical and mental wellness, educational and financial outcomes, and social cohesion, all of which enables them to plan for the future. For communities, low levels of housing insecurity and homelessness are associated with reduced crime rates and environmental impacts, as well as thriving local economies and greater civic pride.

For millions of Americans, though, the very idea of obtaining permanent housing can feel like a pipe dream. That’s especially true among many who have served in the country’s military; The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans reports that while Veterans comprise about 7 percent of Americans ages 18 and older, they comprise nearly 13 percent of the country’s population of homeless adults.

Illinois, which is home to more than 530,000 Veterans, is no stranger to that reality. Last year the Illinois Veterans Advisory Council reported that roughly 7 percent of Veterans who reside in the state live in poverty. Among that population, more than 700 are unhoused, a figure that offers a small snapshot of a larger picture, as it does not account for those living in temporary or other tenuous situations.

The Central Illinois Veterans Commission (CIVC) has been working hard to change that, one Veteran at a time. The Lincoln, Illinois, based organization aims to provide Central Illinois Veterans with the tools and support systems they need to obtain a permanent home. To do so, they partner with a broad range of agencies, including the Veterans Association (VA), educational institutions, and nonprofit groups to connect local Veterans with opportunities for job training, mental health support, financial coaching, and

Illinois Veterans by county Veterans as a percent of the adult population

ILLINOIS COUNTIES by

Tiny Courtesy

Infographic

Infographic by Amber Huff

ple living in them,” Schonauer says. Since then, they’ve built two more homes in Lincoln, and two more in nearby Atlanta.

Number

Illinois Veterans

537,552 6.9%

Percent of Illinois Veterans Living in poverty

Percent of Illinois Veterans Living in poverty 537,552 6.9%

Data supplied by Housing Assistance Council (HAC) Veterans Data Central.

more, however they may be most recognized for their program that provides Veterans with Tiny Homes.

It all started with Joe Schaler, a Vietnam Veteran and Purple Heart recipient who founded CIVC in 2018. “He came back [from Vietnam] and had a career and everything, but he always remembered what it was like to come home,” CIVC secretary Patti Schonauer says. “So he made it his mission to find ways to help Veterans reacclimate when they came back from their service.”

With CIVC, Schaler honed in on housing as the core of that mission. “He had a really strong heart for homeless Veterans, or those that couldn’t find their way to financially support themselves; those who might be couch surfing or living in shelters, with relatives, or whoever,” Schonaur said.

When Schaler learned about organizations that build tiny houses for Veterans, he decided to launch a similar initiative in Central Illinois. CIVC’s first three tiny houses were built on a plot of land in Lincoln that a local businessman donated. “With the support of the community and several foundations and corporations, we were financially able to build those homes and award those to three veterans; today, there are two single veterans and one cou-

Each CIVC tiny home is built on donated plots of land using primarily volunteer labor, and Schonauer says they each cost about $90,000 to complete and furnish. Given the high demand, Veterans must complete CIVC’s application process to be considered for a house. Veterans aren’t required to pay rent or a mortgage, but they must be able to cover utilities and real estate taxes (which Schonauer describes as “minimal”), and commit to upkeep of the home and surrounding yard.

After ten years, the home is officially transferred into the Veteran’s name, but even then, the Veteran is still surrounded by community support—some of which takes the most literal form of that term. “The two-by-fours that are used in the home, we take to different schools or gatherings where we’re speaking, and people will sign them and wish the Veteran well,” Schonauer says.

Schaler sadly passed away in May 2024, but his spirit and vision live on in Central Illinois and beyond. As they look to the future, CIVC hopes to continue building tiny homes for Central Illinois Veterans while providing a model for other groups to build tiny homes for Veterans in their communities. “We’re working on our strategic planning now to look at, you know, what we really want to do in the next few years, but we also have tried to look at how we could handle helping other communities,” Schonauer says.

In the meantime, you can play a part in helping CIVC and other Illinois organizations continue their missions of supporting local Veterans with your purchase of a 7X Bingo Multiplier Instant Ticket from the Illinois Lottery.

To learn more about CIVC and how you can support Illinois Veterans, visit civeteran.org.

This sponsored content is paid for by Illinois Lottery

Tiny homes built by CIVC and awarded to central Illinois veterans. Courtesy of CIVC

Infographic by Amber Huff

FILMFILMFILM

RQUEER WRITERS CLUB

Monthly; Sat 11/23, 2–4 PM, virtual, free chicagofilmmakers.org/upcoming-screenings-and-events/queerwritersclub

Colleen O’Doherty found community at Chicago Filmmakers

Now, as the host of their Queer Writers Club, she’s facilitating community for others.

As TOLD TO KAT SACHS

Albert Camus once declared, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” It’s a tall order, but one perhaps made easier with a community both to support you and to come together in executing such an arduous task. This kind of camaraderie might be found at the monthly Queer Writers Club, a project of both Chicago Filmmakers and Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, hosted by Colleen O’Doherty.

I was stunned to hear that O’Doherty had only moved to Chicago somewhat recently, considering how ingrained she’s become in the community vis-à-vis a successful, ongoing creative program. She has an attitude about getting involved that is inspiring, especially in these times when we may not only feel isolated but actually drawn toward isolation, in the process forsaking a sense of community. Now she helps to facilitate a space where it can be found, perhaps helping to keep civilization from destroying itself, one writing prompt at a time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Imoved to Chicago from Nebraska about two years ago, and part of why I moved here was wanting to get more involved in theater and ﬁlm and burlesque and all these different art things I enjoy. One of the first things I did was try and ﬁnd places I could volunteer at. I dunno if that’s a midwest thing—I was just like, if I help out at things, I’ll meet people, you know?

So I reached out to a bunch of places, and Chicago Filmmakers pretty immediately got back [to me] and was like, “Hey, we have this LGBT film festival, Reeling, and we always need help for it. Like, jump in on that.” And I did, and I just kind of immediately fell in love with Chicago Filmmakers as a whole, because everyone was really welcoming.

Everyone was just super nice. I loved what they were doing. Then I kind of ended up making friends with [someone on the board], but anyway, she reached out and was like, “Hey,

you know, we’ve kind of wanted to create some sort of writing group, and that seems to be your background. Do you have any ideas?” And I was like, “We could do a writing club or a group or something.” So, over the course of time, Queer Writers Club came into being, and I’ve been running it, like—gosh, has it been almost two years? Wow. It’s getting up there. The Queer Writers Club went from an infant to . . . I think she might be walking.

I’d say there’s a decent amount of [Queer Writers Club attendees] that are certainly interested in the ﬁlm world in some way, which

makes sense. I mean, again, if you notice in the name Queer Writers Club, it’s not ﬁlmmaking per se. But that is natural [to assume that], because it’s under the umbrella of Chicago Filmmakers.

[At the meetings,] we keep it pretty informal; also, we’ve played with the format and the structure at various points. What we’re settled into—I think what it’s gonna keep being—is, basically, people show up, and I do some icebreaker kind of intros, and then we just do a bunch of writing prompts, and people write and share and talk about writing.

I’m sure every writing teacher is di erent, but I almost treat it like an exercise session. You have a warm-up, a main thing, a cooldown kind of thing. So for a warm-up prompt, I’ll do something very straightforward, like word association or something like that. There’s all these keep-the-pen-moving exercises you can do. So I’m gonna say a word every minute or every two minutes—write what comes to mind for that. And then you can incorporate the next word or move on to something else. You know, something like that, that just kinda gets the pen moving, so to speak. And then I love a

Colleen O’Doherty KRIS B BOUDOIR

good multistep how-the-heck-am-I-supposedto-incorporate-these-things kind of prompt.

I’ve also sometimes done more ﬁlm-based or screenwriting-based things. Like, you know, I’ll give a bunch of images and a song and all this stu , and be like, “OK, taking all this together, what kind of movie would incorporate these things, and pitch that movie.” So we do some fun stu like that.

One of the alumni from Reeling, he had a really beautiful short ﬁlm a couple years ago. His name’s Austin Bunn, and he is going to be a guest facilitator for this upcoming [Queer Writers Club meeting], which will be November 23. I’m very excited for that. He’s a wonderful artist and teacher.

We ﬁnally had our ﬁrst in-person [meeting] last month. Several people showed up and have maintained friendships. I’m in a group chat that I more observe than jump in on, but everyone, you know, they’re going to movies and stuff. So I think some friendships have come out of it for some folks.

I think we’re gonna move into a hybrid-type model. We’re heading into winter—it’s gonna make more sense to do some of those online. But then, certainly, I think we’re trying to at least maybe quarterly [meet] in person. Online has the beneﬁt of just being more accessible for folks. That’s certainly something that’s always [in the] front of my mind, too, is [that] with Zoom, you can put up captions, and if they have mobility issues, they can just jump in. I think we talked about wanting to keep some sort of online version, but I think there was a hunger for—an interest in—in-person connection.

I guess the only long-term goal I have is to maybe figure out a sustainable structure. It being a volunteer ragtag kind of setup is fun, and [it] works right now. But I think giving it a little more structure and a little more of a setup . . . As [Chicago Filmmakers moves] forward, do we make this the baby of a program manager? I don’t know what that looks like, but giving it a little more of that stability would be great. But then as far as the space, [we’re] just kind of ﬁguring out what programming or what approach works best for folks. I feel like you’re gonna have two components going forward with times of great politi-

Community spaces enable people to embrace their mantle as

a citizen.

cal upheaval or political crisis like this, where, you know, we’re very realistically looking at some infringements on rights and all these things coming down the pipe. There is kind of an emotive personal element, and I think there is a little more of what I would consider

the intellectual political element. How are people going to respond? That work is going to be vital and important and central, but people need spaces where they can also just be processing feelings and just be fully human and have other people that are like, “Yeah, I know, I’m going through this,” or, “I’m scared about this.”

And so I think in that way, community spaces enable people to embrace their mantle as a citizen, by allowing them to ﬁrst kind of take care, like put their oxygen mask on to then go in to do whatever they need to do.

We’re a sharing-writing-space type. I don’t necessarily wanna make that the space where I’m trying to engage something openly, politically. Again, though, it’s a very free space in terms of what people wanna write about and what people wanna say. I mean, everything’s political, but there’s no agenda, there’s no political agenda I certainly ever go in with, ’cause I don’t think that’s conducive to people being able to just use the spaces they want to creatively. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

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

RAll We Imagine as Light

The tenderness of Payal Kapadia’s latest film is rare to see, not only in Indian cinema of late but in general. O en, recently, the concepts of romance, sex, longing, and loss are accompanied by either a pandering level of condescension for the characters or a deep focus on trauma that bypasses emotion for tawdry symbolism. The aim is o en to manipulate the audience into a sense of pity or attraction for the character, rather than letting the characters feel deeply for each other. This movie, with its gentle jazz-piano score by Topshe, its so sound design that turns the cacophony of Mumbai into a lo-fi free-jazz rhythm, and its concentration on its characters’ skin—the warmth, the wetness, the so ness—portrays the intense swirl of everything that surrounds love and belonging in few words. Its subtlety never feels embarrassed about being melodramatic. The poetic overlays and the direct obvious questions that Anu (Divya Prabha) asks her boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), like “Do you ever think about the future?,” are modes of melodrama that slip perfectly into place in the film’s quietness. The forbidden love of a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy refreshingly soars above its political implications. A filmmaker who values meaning over feeling could have easily turned this into a “state of the nation” address, but Kapadia’s eye for the gestures and smirks and tender looks that define burgeoning love rings louder than any pointed commentary that could’ve accompanied it. Prabha and costar Kani Kusruti perfectly embody their disparate experiences with love. Chhaya Kadam’s performance as the easygoing Parvaty is the sturdy bridge that joins them. —SOHAM GADRE 118 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

R

Carnage for Christmas

It was a terrible year for trans rights, but it was a great year for trans cinema. If that’s not a chilling reminder of media representation’s political limits, I’m

not sure what is. But seeing a ﬁlm in person encourages a sense of communion that streaming never will, and anything is possible when we’re able to see one another and grow bonds from shared passions that prove strong enough to change the world beyond, say, a movie theater. That’s why you should mark your calendar for Alice Maio Mackay’s Carnage for Christmas

Mackay is a 20-year-old Australian filmmaker who makes horror movies for people who grew up watching Disney’s Shake It Up but are gay and take drugs now. Earlier this year, her campy, zombieadjacent feature T-Blockers set the Internet ablaze with its parasite-hunting queer girl gang and generous use of bisexual lighting. Now she’s releasing a slasher movie that follows a trans true-crime podcaster as she returns home for the holidays, where there’s a murderer dressed as Santa on the loose. For my taste, the movie is a little too on the nose about who’s good and why; it’s all the tropes of a slasher movie satisfied by characters who feel like hollow representations of various factions of the digital culture wars. There’s no nuance or real elements of tension or surprise. But it’s fun in that it’s such obvious wish fulfillment—trans woman returns to small-minded hometown, is hotter and more successful than everyone else, saves the day because police are useless—that it goes down like a slice of holiday pie.

This time of year can be fraught for many of us in the LGBTQ+ community. (I myself am mostly estranged from my family and have not been back to my hometown in years.) We lean on chosen family to get us through—and maybe escapist fantasies too, like seeing a TERF murdered instead of the typical “woman who enjoyed sex too much.” Trans people can have some dead TERFs this year, as a treat. The screening will be presented by the film’s editor, Vera Drew, better known as director of The People’s Joker (2022), which will be screening at the Music Box Theatre on 35 mm two days following the local Carnage for Christmas screening. Drew will be kicking it off with her first annual Musical Christmas Remix Tribute to Blood and Sex. On Twitter, she promised her introduction would be “one of the most sacrilegious and erotic videos in the history of cinema.” Carnage for Christmas at Facets will be a night of Olive Garden proportions—a neverending pasta bowl of gay fan service—because when you’re at the trans movie screening, you’re family. —MICCO CAPORALE 70 min. Wide release on VOD, screening Thu 11/21 at 9 PM with film editor Vera Drew in attendance, Facets, 1517 W. Fullerton, $12 general admission, $10 Facets members and students, facets.org/programs/veradrew-presents-carnage-for-christmas

Red One

I was hoping that Red One director Jake Kasdan might do for the soulless, overstuﬀed, CGI-driven Christmas movie (I’m looking at you, 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas) what he did for the tortured-artist biopic with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). Instead, Red One answers the question: What if there were a Fast and Furious Christmas movie?

Chris Morgan, who wrote seven entries in the unbrakeable franchise, fills Red One with car chases and CGI fight scenes galore, plus of course heavy-handed talk about family. There is also gratuitous profanity that is as killing to the holiday spirit as the human behavior that has disillusioned Callum Dri (Dwayne Johnson), who means to retire a er more than 500 years on the job as Santa Claus’s head of security. For the first time, he ruefully notes, there are more people on the naughty list than the nice list. But before Cal can make that proverbial last run with code-named Red One, Santa is kidnapped by Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), a shape-shi ing witch out to punish the world’s naughty by encasing them in snow globes. Cal is forced to team up with Jack (Chris Evans), an amoral tracker who inadvertently opened the door for Santa’s abduction. Not believing in Santa as a child was his gateway to the naughty list. He is a degenerate gambler and a deadbeat and neglectful dad. “I’m not going to like you, am I?” Jack asks of Cal when they meet. Well, we know how that’s going to go. With all its North Pole mayhem, Red One plays like a feature-length version of The Night the Reindeer Died, the Christmas movie spoof that kicked off Scrooged (1988). But that was satire, and Red One isn’t kidding. What keeps Red One from being a total, well, brown one is its collateral pleasures: J.K. Simmons’s uncynical and jacked Santa (you’ve got to be in shape for those yearly one-night treks around the world); the criminally underutilized Bonnie Hunt as his wife; Nick Kroll as a middleman in the whole kidnapSanta plot; and Kristofer Hivju as Santa’s estranged brother Krampus, as fine a character creation as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, although a side trip to his castle pads the movie to its more than two-hour runtime. One fleeting moment that involves Cal’s disillusionment that he can no longer see naughty adults’ inner children did get me, and it makes one wish there were more such moments. This is a Christmas film, a er all. —DONALD LIEBENSON PG-13, 123 min. Wide release in theaters

of movie musical and fantasy epic, one of those rare films that truly delivers “all-ages entertainment.” It’s smart, sweet, and sassy in equal measure, with eyepopping special effects, lustrously colorful cinematography and production design, dynamic vocals and dancing, and—best of all—emotionally intimate storytelling. With terrific songs by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell) and screenplay by Winnie Holzman (the original musical book writer) and Dana Fox, it’s remarkably faithful to its stage source—or rather, to the first act of its stage source, with an anticipated part two scheduled for release in 2025. I can hardly wait.

Inspired by Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, which presents an alternative backstory to the classic 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Wicked tells the “true story” of Elphaba Thropp, the unloved, green-skinned daughter of the governor of Munchkinland, who possesses uncanny supernatural powers that she can barely control. Elphaba (whose name is a play on the initials of Oz creator L. Frank Baum) forges an unlikely friendship with her pampered, pretty-in-pink college roommate Galinda, setting the pair on a path to meet none other than the Wizard of Oz himself—a journey that will transform Galinda into Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, and Elphaba into the infamous Wicked Witch of the West.

The heart of the film is the warm relationship between Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s Galinda, which conveys the story’s resonant themes of inclusivity, self-esteem, and the importance of standing up to prejudice and injustice. The terrific supporting cast includes Michelle Yeoh as Elphaba’s mentor in magic, Madame Morrible; charismatic Jonathan Bailey as Elphaba’s possible love interest, Fiyero (more to come in part two); and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard. There’s

RWicked

Jon M. Chu’s ﬁlm version of the 2003 (and still running) Broadway hit is a magniﬁcent synthesis

also delicious cameo appearances by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the roles of Elphaba and Galinda in Wicked’s Broadway premiere. —ALBERT WILLIAMS PG, 160 min. Wide release in theaters v

FILM

In searching for a concise definition of experimental cinema, I came across this description from the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam: “These films by definition are unconventional, and therefore almost never reach a wide audience.” This is true—even the most well-known experimental ﬁlm is unlikely to be seen by even 1/100th of those who see the averagely successful commercial ﬁlm, much less the blockbusters.

Two things I saw this past week intrigued me, as they are by definition “unconventional” yet were made for a wide audience. The first, Robert Zemeckis’s latest film, Here, has been described as experimental in many reviews of it, and the film certainly meets the technical standards of the “genre.” Here ’s gimmick, if you will (though there may be no filmmaker for whom gimmickry is a more earnest pursuit than Zemeckis), is that it’s all shot from the same camera angle, largely taking place in one room, the home of Tom Hanks’s Richard and his family. This includes his childhood through his marriage to Margaret (Robin Wright, with whom Hanks costarred in Zemeckis’s 1994 film Forrest Gump), and what came before and what came after, ranging all the way back from the dinosaurs—a very Malickian touch—to the Black family living there in the near-present day, as is indicated by the conversation they have with their teenage son about police brutality and, later, the emergence of COVID. But it’s nonlinear and also fragmented, literally, with the screen being broken up into squares and rectangles, with parts of one scenario turning into another, piece by piece. (The film is based on a graphic novel, borrowing this panel motif of its source to traverse between eras and families.) Here has been a flop, netting only $11.6 million at the box office against a production budget of approximately $50 million. But I quite liked the film. It’s ambitious, and the formal bravura keeps it fast-paced, making it entertaining on a pretty basic level. Was it the experimentation that detracted from critics’ and audiences’ appreciation of the

otherwise conventional plot? Has Zemeckis pushed it too far past the palatable manipulations of Tom Hanks situated at various historical events?

On the opposite side of things, Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which I saw on 35 millimeter at the Music Box Theatre on Saturday (the matinee screening; I couldn’t stay up for the midnight show on Friday), is still Disney’s most “experimental” ﬁlm to date. Obviously it needs no introduction—Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is part of the cultural fabric. More than that, Fantasia embodies the magic of cinema and the relationship between image and sound, set as it is to all classical music. The mode comes to life through animated vignettes, none of which, except for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” aligns with the “story” of its respective composition.

In both ﬁlms, the makers’ imaginations feel boundless, in Here to imagine several generations of families in one location (boundless in practice but not literally, an interesting juxtaposition), and in Fantasia , any number of situations made animated to music’s most famous classical compositions. I would like to say the experimental mindset perseveres, but alas, while the screening of Fantasia was packed to the gills (lots of families with children, of whom I was super impressed by sitting quietly, for the most part, during a two-hour ﬁlm), Here hasn’t found its audience.

In terms of a more traditional experimental screening, I also went to the second program of the 2024 Eyeworks Experimental Animation Series at Block Cinema on Saturday (after Fantasia), an annual event brilliantly curated by artists Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré. It was a packed house there, too, so perhaps there’s some hope for more straightforwardly (haha) experimental fare.

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.

MUSIC Closed Sessions celebrates underground rap and itself

Founders, friends, and aﬃliates of the Chicago hip-hop label use the occasion of its 15th anniversary to reﬂect on the community it’s built.

By MARK BRABOY

Since its inception as a multimedia project in 2009, local label Closed Sessions has become a shining beacon for Chicago hip-hop and independent rap across the midwest. On Thursday, October 24, hundreds of fans from across the city and beyond gathered for the label’s 15th anniversary at a concert that cofounder Alex Fruchter, aka DJ RTC, had put together at Avondale Music Hall. The event celebrated not only Closed Sessions as an enterprise but also underground hip-hop as a culture. The headliners were two longtime collaborators, DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill and New York rapper Meyhem Lauren. (One of the last interviews posted on Ruby Hornet, the hip-hop blog Fruchter cofounded in 2008, was a 2018 Q&A with Meyhem Lauren.)

tic. It’s real MCing, it’s real rapping, it’s real music,” says rapper TRUTH, half of the dynamic duo. “So for us, when it came to connecting with any kind of independent entity outside of ourselves to grow with, it made sense to be with them.”

Closed Sessions thrives because its foundation is the network of relationships Fruchter built during his years blogging at Ruby Hornet. He was part of a nationwide rap-blog community, maintaining external relationships with artist managers and publicists and internal relationships with his writing peers. He was one of the ﬁrst curators in Chicago who would write about an artist and organize an

Closed Sessions mainstays Defcee, BoatHouse, GreenSllime, and SolarFive also rocked the evening, and south-side rapper Recoechi, the label’s newest act, delivered a soulful set that doubled as a coming-out party.

Last month’s celebration also recognized the label’s evolution. Fruchter launched Closed Sessions with Michael Kolar, founder of the defunct Soundscape Studios (reopened under a new name by Classick Studios in 2023), and in the years since, it’s grown from a content hub into an independent multimedia brand and cultural curator that includes not just a record label but also an event and production company.

“I mean, at the heart of it, it’s still a label, but what a label is has changed so much,” says Fruchter. “It’s an extension of me at this

point, of who I am—a DJ, collector, writer. So it encompasses the [live interview and dinner series] Legend Conversations with Dave Je and encompasses these events and shows. At the heart of the day, though, it’s making vinyl, putting out music, signing artists, and helping get the world to care about them.”

The house that Closed Sessions built is home to a stacked roster that includes some of the midwest’s most gifted hip-hop artists. Over the years they’ve helped lay groundwork for the likes of Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, Jamila Woods, Mick Jenkins, and Femdot.

Chicago group Mother Nature have been working with Closed Sessions for years, most recently on this month’s EP Caps n Stemz .

“Closed Sessions is Chicago. It’s very eclec-

need a studio. I’ll do anything you want. You can use it whenever you want, but you use just my studio.’ To stay in business as a studio, he needed to advertise. So he got free advertising through Ruby Hornet, because I’m taking pictures. Remember, this is before Instagram. Those parties—people will come to the party, and then the next day they’re going to Ruby Hornet to look at the photos. Those are some of our most popular posts. So it’s creating this community, and I think that’s really how the network built.”

Closed Sessions began as a project of Ruby Hornet where Fruchter and Kolar would invite rappers to record at Soundscape. The name

event around them.

“No one really was doing this blueprint I was able to put together, where we’re covering the artists, then we’re doing the party,” Fruchter says.

Beginning around summer 2008, he set up the first Chicago shows for online rap phenoms such as Action Bronson, J. Cole, Mac Miller, Danny Brown, and Yelawolf. In June 2009, he began his partnership with Kolar, which turned out to be vital to establishing the Closed Sessions community.

“I was just at Soundscape all the time and asked Mike to master my mixtape, and I went to pay him,” Fruchter recalls. “He was like, ‘So you could pay me now, and you could just pay me for ﬁve hours. But how about this? You

“Closed Sessions” came from their first experiment, a July 2009 visit from New Orleans independent rap legend Curren$y. He came to Chicago for a show, and while he was here, Ruby Hornet had a cameraman ﬁlm him at the studio. Kolar recalls Curren$y making only a few simple requests: “Yo, all I want is a lot of weed and the lights dimmed and the session closed.”

Kolar says Ruby Hornet’s livestream and mini documentary of Curren$y’s studio session gained a lot of traction online at a time when other national blogs were being hit with takedown notices for sharing major-label content. Ruby Hornet succeeded with original content, and that was the dawn of Closed Sessions.

At the Closed Sessions 15th-anniversary party in October: label cofounder Alex Fruchter, aka DJ RTC, and Closed Sessions artist Recoechi MARK BRABOY FOR CHICAGO READER

“It’s like, hey, let’s start bringing in other artists,” Kolar says. “Alex was a DJ, and he had a residency at Lava Lounge, like a monthly thing. So he started bringing out di erent artists to come and do a set at his monthly residency— and then come to the studio. And for whatever reason, we were like, the Curren$y model is best. Keep all the bullshit out. Close the session and let the artist curate an environment that they like. Just to make a closed, private space for artists to be artists and to let their guard down and let the camera and the readers kind of peek into their creative process.” By creating and owning their own content, Closed Sessions helped secure a revenue stream. “I think an important lesson was deﬁnitely the value of our content,” Fruchter says. “We licensed Closed Sessions Vol. 2, which we released in August 2012 and I think was our best compilation, and it was two years’ worth of monthly sessions.” That summer, Fruchter licensed Closed Sessions’ documentaries to MTV2, which aired them on the Sunday video-countdown show The Week in Jams (a rebranding of Sucker Free).

One thing that’s always helped Fruchter seal the deal is the power of showing gratitude, which his father taught him growing up. “My dad always told me, early on, if you just say thank you to people, you’ll be ahead of the game,” he says. “Because a lot of people don’t even come back to say thank you.”

Closed Sessions’ unofficial introduction to the rest of the rap world arrived in March 2010 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Fruchter rented a mansion and invited rising acts and veteran rappers from Chicago and across the country to come hang out and record music together. Word of mouth quickly turned the house into a hub, and artists Fruchter hadn’t even contacted started showing up: Paul Wall, J. Cole, Killer Mike, and more. A selection of the sessions would become the 2011 compilation Closed Sessions: ATX. Longtime Closed Sessions producer BoatHouse recalls that momentous occasion. “Bun B, Curtains, DJ Babu, Freddie Gibbs, Fashawn—like, they’re inviting as many people as they can to this mansion to just record. That was the essence right there. We rented this mansion—who knows what could come from this, but producers come to the mansion and hang out, and then you never know who’s gonna roll through and just make music. That was a true forming of that network, a really pivotal forming.”

Many of these artists were Fruchter’s friends and people he genuinely believed in,

Closed Sessions releases featuring Mother Nature, Kweku Collins, Defcee, BoatHouse, Jamila Woods, Kipp Stone, Ajani Jones, and Femdot.

but he had another major motivation too: he’d made a decision to be mindful of the lyrical slant of the music he was distributing, so that he could stand behind it. This meant a lot at a time when Chicago drill had the nation by the throat.

“These were my friends and contacts,” Fruchter says. “So that’s my starting point. But the other part of it is just making a conscious effort to be authentic and be serious about karma and messages being put into the world. And I just kind of felt like, if I’m gonna run a record label, it should be things I can actually relate to myself. As a Jewish person starting a hip-hop label, I wanted to release music that I felt good about, that didn’t feel exploitative.”

Closed Sessions rapper Defcee trusts Fruchter’s taste. “When it comes to his ear for talent, he’s always the ﬁrst one to pick it up and pull it under his wing,” he says. “And I also think he loves rappin’-ass raps. He’s a hip-hop head through and through. It’s only natural that somebody like Alex, who’s been trying to make a label in Chicago happen for so long, saw that

if this shit booboo or not. Alex real picky with what he like, and I love that about him—he’s really a fan of this shit.”

When I ask Fruchter if he’s “living the dream,” he answers both ways.

“Yes and no,” he says. “In some regards, 100 percent I’ve lived things I only dreamed about. I was on a boat with BoatHouse, Kweku Collins, and Quentin Tarantino. Those are crazy, crazy experiences. Being able to get booked to play in Thailand and then go around the whole country, meeting the people I’ve met, going from wanting to be in the studio to running a label. So yeah, in that case, deﬁnitely living the dream. At the same time, it’s incredibly di cult, and it’s a grind. I’m not sitting here, like, ‘Everything is awesome!’ I’m content, you know. I’ve done a lot, but this industry is very much like, ‘What are you doing right now?’ So I almost don’t even have time to sleep.”

Despite the realities Fruchter has to deal with running a multifaceted record company, he’s still a hip-hop lover first—and when I catch up to him at the Closed Sessions celebration, he’s gleefully excited that one of his favorite DJs of all time is performing.

there was a lane for it here.”

Another Closed Sessions artist, Cleveland rapper and producer Kipp Stone, appreciates that the label provides supportive infrastructure he’d otherwise have to build himself. “I’ve always looked at it like me having to work a job, like just a nine-to-ﬁve job, while pursuing a rap career,” he explains. “I could be doing that, or I could be running the streets, you know. It’s kind of like that same balance, at least as far as time is concerned. And I think they just understand it. And whenever you sign, or when you tap in with them, there is a plan for real. You just got to stick to the plan.”

Recoechi sees Fruchter as having transcended his status as an outsider to the culture. “He’s an example of how hip-hop has no bounds to what color you are,” he says. “A dude like me, who works in the community— and experiences racism all the time—I never thought I’d be working with a white guy this close, where I trust him with my intellectual property. I trust his discernment because I know he respects hip-hop, and he gonna say

“I’m fucking stoked that DJ Muggs is playing my label’s 15th anniversary, because I wore out the Cypress Hill CDs,” he says. “I wanted to be in Cypress—like, I wanted to be a member of that group. I pretended to be B-Real all the time. So there’s part of me that’s just like, ‘Man, this is awesome,’ and would be happy if no one comes. But then there’s the real part of me that’s an adult, that’s like, it also has to make sense.”

Fruchter’s longtime friend Andrew Barber (they were classmates at Indiana University Bloomington in the early 2000s) founded the Chicago-based rap blog Fake Shore Drive in 2007. “In the beginning, Fake Shore Drive and Ruby Hornet were the only ones that were doing it,” Barber told Reader writer Leor Galil in 2017. “I learned a lot from Ruby Hornet and Alex and what those guys did early on. They worked hard, and they made me better.”

I ask Barber what Closed Sessions means to Chicago hip-hop today, after 15 years. “They always did good work, always put out quality content, thoughtful content, stayed on brand, stayed on message, and really celebrated just hip-hop, not the BS around it,” he says. “Good music. You know, the essence of hip-hop. I think that’s what, to me, Closed Sessions and Alex always represented—the essence of hip-hop and continuing to build on that legacy.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Viewﬁnder were a band out of time

Their artful, UK-inﬂuenced pop didn’t ﬁnd its audience in a 90s Illinois underground dominated by burly rock, but a new reissue gives them another chance.

By STEVE KRAKOW

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

Nostalgia tells us that the “alternative” musical revolution of the early 1990s saw androgynous shoegazers, fierce riot grrrls, and punky grunge bands elbowing aside hair metal and slick pop on the charts. But this cultural shift didn’t mean local scenes were suddenly inclusive, aesthetically diverse places. Though the 90s underground in Champaign-Urbana had a few woman-led bands (Sarge, Corndolly), it was dominated by ironically macho rock (Honcho Overload, Hardvark, Steakdaddy Six) and manly “butt grunge” (my term, please share). The group Viewﬁnder, formed in C-U and later based in Chicago, swam against this current with an artful sound indebted to sophisticated, decadent UK artists—and during their initial late90s run, they didn’t ﬁnd an audience. A new reissue is giving them a second chance.

Viewﬁnder front man and guitarist Nathan Rosser was born October 30, 1974, in Decatur, Illinois. At age ten, he loved the new-wave radio anthems of Wham! and got a cassette of Tears for Fears’ Songs From the Big Chair as a gift. In high school, he was drawn to the literate tunes of Depeche Mode, XTC, and the Smiths.

Guitarist Jeff Madden was born September 7, 1973, also in Decatur. Rosser says the two of them “have a shared history of underage drinking in cornﬁelds.” Along with his seven siblings, Madden took piano lessons and played in the school band. His brother Scott, a jazz drummer, got him into drums, and he also picked up saxophone and guitar.

Bassist Jay Gocek has the same birthday as Madden, but he was born in Franklin Park and raised in the Chicago suburb of Addison. He started messing around on keyboards in junior high, and he and two friends formed a bedroom recording project called the Puppet Club, which he calls “a sort of lo-ﬁ Negativland meets Ween meets Front 242 bit of nonsense.” In 1992 he picked up his ﬁrst bass, inspired in part by Peter Hook’s melodic playing in New Order.

Rosser and Madden attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they met Gocek. I got to know Rosser because we were both ﬁne arts students at UIUC, concentrating on painting. Rosser had several Champaign bands before Viewﬁnder, and in 1994, he briefly drummed in one with me (I owned a guitar but couldn’t play a note) and future members of Spires That in the Sunset Rise (friends of his from Decatur). After a living-room gig that ended in seconds when a guitar amp blew up, that group dissolved before even getting a name.

Rosser fell under the spell of T. Rex and Roxy Music and decided he wanted to be a singer and guitarist. At a college party, he strolled up to the most stylish guys he could ﬁnd, guitarist Steve Lyon and drummer Joaquin McCoy, and asked them to start a glam-rock group. They became Secret Agent X-9, and after a few practices, Gocek joined.

Gocek’s only real band up to that point had been short-lived shoegaze act Drown, who broke up without a recording in 1993. “My lasting memory of that group was playing our last show completely out of my head on acid at a campus church while a fog machine engulfed me,” Gocek recalls. “I wondered how the hell I was going to keep it together long enough to ﬁnish the set. Our guitarist had an ancient Vox

amp that had once nearly electrocuted me at practice, and it blew up about three songs in. I was never more relieved.”

Secret Agent X-9 lasted less than a year, but they laid the groundwork for Viewﬁnder to form in mid-1996. From the beginning, the core lineup consisted of Madden, Rosser, and Gocek. Madden started on drums but switched to guitar (after Lyon moved to Chicago), and he influenced the band’s sound with his record collection as well as his riffs. “Madden brought a lot of bands to my attention that I had never heard before, like Big Star and the Go-Betweens,” Rosser says. “I recall listening to a lot of Ride, Blur, Pulp—honestly any soppy fey British trash I could get my hands on.”

After Madden became Viewﬁnder’s second guitarist, the band went through almost as many drummers as Spinal Tap. The ﬁrst one was nicknamed “Creepy D,” and though Rosser recalls him having “some kind of mentor vibe,” he went AWOL at a rough moment. “He ditched us on the eve of our first Blind Pig show,” Rosser says. The band begged their friend Rob Lloyd (who drummed in Bantha) to step in, and he learned their whole set in two days in Creepy D’s basement, where they were

still rehearsing.

“This was around the time one of Creepy D’s housemates stole my ﬁrst amp and his dog left a giant deuce in front of my amp in the practice space,” Rosser recalls. Drummer Je Garber (from multifaceted emo band Castor) eventually took over from Lloyd.

At the time, the Blind Pig was the best club on the Champaign indie circuit (I saw Mazzy Star and Unrest there), and Viewﬁnder opened a show at the Pig for the legendary Brainiac in November 1996. “Our friend Faiz Razi recorded the Brainiac show o the soundboard and released it on [the Brainiac rarities compilation] From Dayton Ohio in 2021,” Madden says. “Brainiac pretty much blew us off the stage.”

Viewﬁnder didn’t su er from a shortage of gigs in Champaign-Urbana. They played the usual house parties and bars, plus annual festivals such as the Band Jam. Toward the end of their time downstate, they opened for indie bands Holiday, Braid, Sarge, and Acetone, among others. But they still felt like outsiders. “We were di erent sounding from the Champaign scene at the time—everything was so RAWK,” Madden says. “We loved guitar pedals

that weren’t distortion. Anything that created emotion in the music that wasn’t ‘I am going to rock your ever-lovin’ brains out.’”

Viewfinder captured their nuanced sound on their lone album, The Stars on Ice. They’d signed to the local Mud Records, founded by Geo Merritt, who also ran a label called Parasol and its associated distributor. (He handled many UK imports, which made him a good ﬁt for Viewﬁnder.) The band recorded the album in early 1997 at Private Studios in Urbana with Brendan Gamble (drummer of the Moon Seven Times) and released it in May of that year.

The ﬁrst track from The Stars on Ice, “Zero Coupon,” sounds like a mission statement: arty jangle turns on a dime into urgent postpunk topped with Rosser’s dour, New Romantic–style vocals. On “Night’s Life and the Morning’s After,” Gocek’s supple bass, Madden’s shimmery post–Cocteau Twins guitar, and Rosser’s glammy but gloomy vocals invite comparisons to the Chameleons and Pale Saints. “I Wouldn’t Go Out With Me Either,” with its clubby drum-machine beat and synths and Rosser’s self-deprecating post–

Magnetic Fields lyrics, sounds like it could’ve charted in the UK alongside Pulp or Electronic. Music mag The Big Takeover gave The Stars on Ice a glowing review, while the Daily Illini at UIUC was, as Madden puts it, “catty.”

Before a small east-coast tour to promote the album (at one gig, the audience consisted entirely of Rosser’s brother and his wife), Viewﬁ nder brought aboard yet another new drummer, Champaign-Urbana native Rebecca Rury. When the band moved to Chicago in summer 1997, renting a house at Whipple and Waveland, she stayed behind. They returned to C-U later that year to play with Rury at a beloved annual cover-band extravaganza called the Great Cover Up (where they appeared as Wham!).

Viewﬁ nder hoped more people in Chicago would appreciate their Anglophilic leanings, and they hit the ground running—soon they’d landed gigs at Lounge Ax, the Empty Bottle, and Metro. The band’s next drummer, Kamran Sullivan, joined in late 1997, and Viewﬁnder recorded at Kingsize Sound Labs with Mike Hagler.

“Our poor drummer ended up paying for about a third of the Kingsize session of three songs, even though he only played on half of just one song,” Madden says. “I think someone still owes him for that!” On the other tracks, they used a drum machine. Unfortunately, they didn’t release the recordings at the time.

Rosser remembers Viewfinder being met with skepticism at a Fireside Bowl gig where they ambitiously brought along a cellist (who only stayed in the band for a few weeks). They felt out of step with their musical surroundings, even in Chicago. Viewfinder dissolved when Rosser moved to Los Angeles in 1999.

Madden, Gocek, and old pal Lyon (who’d rejoined Viewﬁnder on keyboards after their move) carried on as Good Robot. That quickly fizzled out, though—they didn’t have a singer, and they were too spread out around Chicagoland. Gocek is now raising a family in Evanston and working as a graphic designer. Madden still lives in Chicago, where he holds down a job in the mortgage business and plays keys, guitar, and baritone sax with the

Joynt Cheefs. Rosser is in Pasadena, where he works for a poster company and continues to pursue his early love of painting.

Twenty-five years after Viewfinder broke up, though, Rosser was approached by an old fan, Jake Burkhart, who now runs a boutique vinyl reissue label called Castle Danger Records. A deluxe two-LP version of The Stars on Ice came out November 19, and it includes four bonus tracks: the three unreleased Kingsize tunes as well as a demo.

“I always felt that the vision we had for our songwriting, and the unspoken mission we shared as a band, was representing inﬂuences and styles not particularly fashionable at the time,” says Rosser. Here’s hoping now is a better time for Viewﬁnder. Personally, I’m pulling for a reunion. v

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

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of November 21

Immortal Bird spread their wings on Sin Querencia

IMMORTAL BIRD, MOTHER OF GRAVES, PAYASA, APOPHY

Sat 11/23, 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $25, $20 in advance. 17+

EVERY FEW YEARS, CHICAGO’S STORIED , genre-mashing metal outﬁt Immortal Bird migrates back into the studio to weave a prickly yet embracing sort of nest. Their new album, October’s Sin Querencia (20 Buck Spin), is their ﬁrst full-length since 2019’s Thrive on Neglect, and its arrival suggests a band who like to take their time at their craft. The group have scaled down from a four-piece to a three-piece in the studio, and the assured feel of the new material shows that vocalist Rae Amitay, guitarist Nate Madden, and drummer Matt Korajczyk are collaborators who know each other’s minds.

They recorded the album with Pete Grossmann at Bricktop Recording, with all three members playing bass parts (and Amitay adding keyboard and synth). It opens with “Bioluminescent Toxins,” which plays like a multichapter story; it’s raw, dank, and aggressive, and it cracks open in the middle to let the light through with lilting, clean vocals before brutally slamming shut. Immortal Bird are a band with so many ideas they can blow through them promiscuously or turn on a dime, and on Sin Querencia there isn’t a dull or wasted moment. The pummeling, churning ri of “Propagandized” fades into the inexorable tsunami surge of “Ocean Endless,” which relentlessly shifts

through startling tempo changes and abrupt twists and turns. The rhythm section really shines bright, and the starkly angular title track is bolstered by a nimble, rubbery bass line from Kayhan Vaziri (Coliseum, Yautja), Amitay’s bandmate in the duo Wretched Blessing. (Vaziri has also been providing additional thunder to Immortal Bird as their live bassist.)

“Sin querencia” essentially means to be without a place where one feels safe, and this album evokes the dread of a world where fascism appears to be creeping at every corner. But perhaps paradoxically, its heavy, dark music is compelling and inviting enough to become a querencia in itself, where outside pressures match the pressures within, evoking a sense of catharsis that brings relief.

On Facebook, Immortal Bird have warned that this Reggies release party will be their last local show for quite a while—now that Sin Querencia is out, they plan to play a few gigs here and there and with any luck embark on some major tours next year. This stacked bill also includes Indianapolis death-doom outﬁt Mother of Graves, Lake County hardcore band Payasa, and Chicago blackened thrash unit Apophy. —MONICA KENDRICK

FRIDAY22

Snotty Nose Rez Kids Travis Thompson opens. 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $37.08, $30.90 in advance. b

Snotty Nose Rez Kids are a Vancouver-based hiphop duo who use their music to explore their Indigenous identities, dismantle stereotypes and misconceptions, and shed light on the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce grew up down the street from each other in the Haisla Nation of British Columbia’s Kitamaat Village. A er high school, when Metz pursued an audio engineering program, they began recording together for one of his class assignments. In 2016, they oﬃcially formed Snotty Nose Rez Kids, and the following year they self-released their self-titled debut and its follow-up, The Average Savage, which was short-listed for the 2018 Polaris Prize and nominated for Best Rap/Hip-Hop Album at the Indigenous Music Awards.

Snotty Nose Rez Kids signed to Sony in 2023, which afforded them more resources and studio time to stretch out and experiment on their fi h fulllength (they’ve estimated they made more than 50 demos before paring down the record’s final tracks). Red Future embodies a spirit of Indigenous futurism, and its imaginative, beat-heavy songs, which feature guest spots from a who’s who of contemporary Indigenous artists, including Calgary rapper Drezus and Australian electro-soul duo Electric Fields, share visions of liberation, sovereignty, and self-determination. As Nyce raps on “Peaches” (which features a powerful verse from feminist rapper Princess Nokia), “Dis ain’t ’bout the money, the fame, or awards / We for the children like child support / I’m rez to the bone, straight from the source / I been on fire, I come with the torch.” Snotty Nose Rez Kids embrace the duality of maintaining centuries-old traditions in a modern world on the lighthearted “BBE” (an abbreviation for “big braid energy”), while the dark, gritty “Devil’s Club,” featuring Apsaalooke Nation singer-songwriter Rezcoast Grizz, plays off the name of a spike-covered shrub (used for ceremonial and medicinal purposes in many Indigenous communities) to create a metaphor for being dangerously self-contained. “We’ve always said, ‘Tell your story the way you want it to be told, and the universe will gravitate towards it,’” Metz said in a 2021 video interview for SOCANmusic. So far, they’ve been right on the mark.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

Ten City This concert, billed as “Ten City and friends,” also includes White Knight, Curtis McClain, Harry Dennis, and the Good Girls. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $50, $40 in advance, four tickets $100, table for two $150. 18+

In June 2023, the city gave landmark status to a stubby brick factory building at 206 S. Jeﬀerson— in the late 1970s, it had housed the nightclub where Frankie Knuckles wove funk, disco, soul, and pop into the subcultural lifeline that became known as house music. Three months earlier, Preservation Chicago had named the Warehouse one of the city’s seven most endangered historical buildings, and seeing the city move quickly (relatively speak-

VANESSA VALADEZ

ing) gave me some hope that it might do more to celebrate house music as a bona ﬁde Chicago institution. A er all, house became a global phenomenon thanks to generations of Chicagoans who are in many cases still producing, DJing, and dancing—and few get their flowers while they’re still alive. The 1987 Rhythm Controll single “My House” became a foundational text of the genre thanks to an impassioned (and widely sampled) dance-floor sermon by producer and vocalist Chuck Roberts, but when Roberts died this past June, the Sun-Times called him an “unknown house music legend.”

Earlier this year, storied house producer Vince Lawrence launched House Music 40, a nonprofit dedicated to celebrating the genre’s history (especially its Black origins) and giving ﬁnancial support to local house artists struggling with health issues. The nonprofit’s name references the number of years that have passed since Lawrence and Chosen Few DJ Jesse Saunders made the first original house record, Saunders’s “On and On,” which helped establish the genre’s identity and accelerated its international takeover. This past January, Chicago house promoter Kirk Townsend (who as a teenager in the late 1970s helped turn Mendel High School into a crucial house hub) launched a GoFundMe to help Saunders recover from a severe stroke he suffered in November 2022. The musicians, promoters, and fans who built house aren’t waiting around for the city to provide for their community.

House Music 40 is among the cosponsors of tonight’s unusual performance by Chicago house veterans Ten City, who’ve been active on and off since 1987. They’ll be backed by a 14-piece band, which ought to do a lot to flesh out the sophisticated ornamentation and glamorous flair on the band’s recordings—I’ve listened to Ten City’s 1989 hit “That’s the Way Love Is” o en enough to wonder what it’d be like to see a live string section interact in real time with the velvety vocals of Byron Stingily. And as a setting for this grand display, Metro is perfect: Joe Shanahan has a long history with house and opened Metro and Smart Bar in 1982, drawing inspiration from his experiences at the Warehouse and Chicago’s first punk disco, La Mere Vipere. And while I still dream of the day when Ten City can command a stage at Soldier Field or the United Center, this might be an even better way to celebrate their contributions to house: surrounded by people who care about it in a space intimate enough to remind you that you’re as much a part of this culture as the people onstage. —LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY23

Immortal Bird See Pick of the Week on page 26. Mother of Graves, Payasa, and Apophy open. 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $25, $20 in advance. 17+

J Bambii Pink Siifu, Sista Salem, Dialect Tre, and Such N Such open. 8:30 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $22.66. 21+

In a 2015 interview on the AirGo Radio podcast, host Daniel Kisslinger called Jasmine Barber, who raps as J Bambii, “Chicago’s shining light.” That

praise may sound grandiose at first pass, but the multihyphenate creative has earned it with her art and her years of building community by organizing parties, ﬁlm screenings, ﬁshing trips, tarot readings, and artist showcases on the south side and beyond. Barber has been etching her name into the foundation of Chicago’s artistic scene since she was a

teenager. She became enamored with spoken-word poetry as a freshman at Morgan Park High School a er hearing Daniel Beaty’s poem “Knock Knock,” which explores the relationship between a Black boy and the father who abandoned him. “I remember being like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do,’” she recalled in a 2023 interview with the Sun-Times

So she began writing and performing, honing her craft at West Town creative writing incubator Young Chicago Authors, where she won awards for her slam poetry.

Barber’s poetic beginnings are omnipresent in her music, especially in the ﬂuid way she lays down vivid metaphors next to real-world experiences. On “Chaos,” the lead single from her forthcoming debut album, Black American Beauty, she describes feeling simultaneously fetishized and rejected by past lovers. “Niggas’ tongues got amnesia all of a sudden / Hiding all yo crystals when you leaving the coven / Tryna act like it ain’t me that you loving,” she raps.

Barber speaks with emotional potency; she’s not shy about confessing and confronting her feelings in interviews, social media posts, or in person. But in her music she doesn’t just tell you about the introspection, spirituality, and healing that powers her cre-

ativity, she invites you to experience it with her—and that feels very fucking good.

When it comes to music, this year has been especially busy for Barber. Along with her work as J Bambii, she’s held a DJ residency at California Clipper under the name Psychic Pu$$y, and she’s continued to organize and host monthly south-side party the Fiﬁ, which she launched in 2022. And in October, she released her second short ﬁlm, Church Fan (following last year’s Chaos), which doubles as a music video for the album single of the same name. At this Sleeping Village show, Barber will perform songs from Black American Beauty. She’ll have support from Ohio artists Pink Siifu (currently based in Atlanta) and Sista Salem, plus hometown artists Dialect Tre and Such N Such (who will open the night with a DJ set). —MATT HARVEY

Spun Out Tension Pets and Finesse open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+

Chicago indie-rock outfit Spun Out have always drawn inspiration from UK postpunk of all stripes— especially its tendency to create drama by adding a sudden ray of sunshine to a dark, austere atmosphere. Their best material rushes past your ears like the breeze oﬀ a northern beach. “Pale Green Sky,” from the new Dream Noise (Shuga), opens with sounds that remind me of crashing waves and ocean spray, but even if it didn’t, I would’ve imagined them. On Dream Noise, Spun Out lean into psychedelia to make their otherwise stark songs sound vital and expansive, like a garden going through its full spring bloom in a matter of minutes. Everyone in the band plays with the relaxed poise of a veteran musician, which we’ve got every reason to expect: keyboardist James Weir and guitarist-vocalist Michael Wells

Snotty Nose Rez Kids MACKENZIE WALKER

J Bambii LUCIANA SALINAS

Marshall Jeﬀerson and Byron Stingily of Ten City COURTESY THE ARTIST

MUSIC

continued from p. 27

were in Ne-Hi, bassist Chris Sutter leads Meat Wave, synth player Sean Page records under his own name, and drummer Joshua Wells is also a producer and engineer who’s worked with Destroyer (he recorded and mixed Dream Noise too). Spun Out can ignite their songs with nimble shifts and huge structural transitions, and “High Life” is a perfect example, progressing from a pensive postpunk melody to a dreamy falsetto prechorus and then into an upli ing, anthemic chorus whose triumphant swagger takes over the outro. —LEOR GALIL

TUESDAY26

Xeno & Oaklander Panic Priest opens. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $15. 17+

Long-running minimal electronic group Xeno & Oaklander turned heads with 2019’s Hypnos, where they shed much of their usual monochromatic textures and le -ﬁeld predilections for a pop-forward direction powered by polyphonic synthesizers. But the about-face proved successful, and the Brooklynbased duo of Sean McBride and Liz Wendelbro con-

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

foreboding melodies, while the uncanny, icy “Raingarden” could pass as the theme song for a longlost 80s murder-mystery TV show.

Xeno & Oaklander’s brand-new eighth album, Via Negativa (In the Doorway Light), may be titled and themed around “a study of what not to do,” but musically speaking, the duo get plenty right. On “Lost and There,” McBride and Wendelbro trade vocal lines over a backdrop of heightening suspense, and “Actor’s Foil” is built on a staunch rhythm that seems to mirror Wendelbro’s opening line (“You walk with intention / In the circle of my attention”). On “O Vermillion,” McBride’s deadpan delivery counters Wendelbro’s airy singing and spoken-word vocals, which together recall the romantic style of classic French pop. The record’s lush atmospheres and robust beats should feel even more gigantic live, so break out your dancing shoes.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

WEDNESDAY27

The O’My’s Shawnee Dez, Frsh Waters, Sparklmami, and DJ Coco Nico open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $25, $20 in advance. 18+

tinued down that Technicolor path on 2021’s Vi/deo , recorded in their Connecticut home studio in the ﬁrst year of the pandemic. Its songs feel both inviting and distant, nostalgic and modern: “Inﬁnite Sadness” juxtaposes Wendelbro’s half-whispered, wistful singing against bold, propulsive rhythms and

Nick Hennessey and Maceo Vidal-Haymes—best known as the core duo behind genre-bending outﬁt the O’My’s—are hyperactive in Chicago’s music scene, collaborating with like-minded folks and pushing their sound with each and every project they release. Their brand-new fourth full-length, Trust the Stars , walks a thin line between funkiness and grittiness while serving up a fresh take on rock ’n’ soul psychedelia. “Nothing Much,” which features Chicago singer Jamila Woods, is breezy, whispery soul, while “Skipping Stars,” featuring rapper Pink Siifu, is space-rock–kissed funk.

The O’My’s celebrate Trust the Stars with a record- release show at Metro, and they’ve curated a vibe-stuffed lineup for the occasion, including gi ed singersongwriter Shawnee Dez (also a Reader staffer who hosts the biweekly culture podcast The Sit Down ). Frsh Waters is a hungry, charismatic west-side-repping rapper known for his work in Pivot Gang. Last month he had a great feature on the collective’s latest single, “Who at the Door?,” and joined Pivot Gang front man Saba for an exciting performance marking the tenth anniversary of Saba’s solo album Comfort Zone. Rounding out the bill is improvisational, experimental artist Sparklmami, whose multicultural blend of neosoul, jazz, and pop makes for stimulating performances. This eclectic night promises to remind us of just how blessed we are that so many talented artists call Chicago home. It really must be something in the water. —CRISTALLE BOWEN v

The O’My’s DANIEL DUKANE

EARLY WARNINGS

DECEMBER

TUE 12/3

Almost There but Not Really, Daarling, Ceruleum, Atheena 9 PM, Sleeping Village AJ McQueen 8 PM, the Promontory b

WED 12/4

Abby Sage 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+

THU 12/5

400 Years featuring Isaiah Collier and others 7 PM, DuSable Black History Museum & Education Center b Greg Ward Quartet 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase b

FRI 12/6

Coalesce, Meth. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+

Constellations, Night Swims, Rain Garden 8:30 PM, Reggies Music Joint Totally 80s HoliGAY with Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus 8 PM, Harris Theater b Greg Ward Quartet 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase b

SAT 12/7

Christian Death, Xentrifuge, Black Season Witch 8:30 PM, Reggies Music Joint

Greg Ward Quartet 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase b

SUN 12/8

Greg Ward Quartet 4 and 8 PM, Jazz Showcase b

WED 12/11

ML Buch, Dorothy Carlos 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

SAT 12/14

Ship Wrek, No Thanks 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+

MON 12/16

Fugu Dugu & Alfonso Ponticelli

7:30 PM, City Winery b

TUE 12/17

Kahil El’Zabar & David Murray

7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b

FRI 12/20

Kash Doll 8 PM, Ramova Theatre, 18+

SAT 12/21

Ryan Elliott, Kate Simko, Dylan Gold 10 PM, Smart Bar

34th Annual Winter Solstice Evening Concert night one featuring Hamid Drake & William Parker, Michael Zerang & Bill MacKay 8 PM, Constellation, 18+

SUN 12/22

34th Annual Winter Solstice Evening Concert night two featuring William Parker, Zahra Glenda Baker, Ben LaMar Gay, Jim Baker, Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang, and more 8 PM, Constellation, 18+

THU 12/26

Waco Brothers Yuletide Double Header night one featuring the Waco Brothers, Tennis Court Oath 8:30 PM, Hideout

FRI 12/27

Dave East, DJ Mustafa Rocks 10 PM, the Promontory Waco Brothers Yuletide Double Header night two featuring the Waco Brothers, the James Dean Joint 8:30 PM, Hideout

SAT 12/28

Home for the Skalidays! featuring Mustard Plug and others 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

TUE 12/31

Capital Soirée, Worry Club, Braymores 9 PM, Schubas

JANUARY

SAT 1/4/2025

Nicholas Tremulis & the Prodigals, DJ Joe Shanahan 8 PM, Metro, 18+

SAT 1/11/2025

Sons of the Silent Age featuring Michael Shannon 7 PM, Metro b

Early Warnings newsletter: sign up here

SAT 1/25/2025

Sean Rowe 8 PM, Judson & Moore Distillery Trouble 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+

BEYOND

FRI 2/7/2025

Baynk 8 PM, Park West, 18+

SAT 2/8/2025

Gouge Away, Gumm 8 PM, Cobra Lounge b

SAT 2/15/2025

Dua Saleh, Sam Austins 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

FRI 3/14/2025

Mary J. Blige, Ne-Yo, Mario 7 PM, United Center b

SAT 3/15/2025

Knock2 10 PM, Radius, 18+

SAT 3/22/2025

Chiodos, Hawthorne Heights, Emmure, Callous Daoboys 7 PM, the Vic b

THU 3/27/2025

Kelly Lee Owens 8 PM, Metro, 18+

FRI 3/28/2025

Screeching Weasel, Hayley & the Crushers 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+

SAT 3/29/2025

Tommy Richman, Mynameisntjmack 7:30 PM, Avondale Music Hall b Screeching Weasel, Hayley & the Crushers 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+

TUE 4/1/2025

Naked Giants 9 PM, Empty Bottle

SAT 4/5/2025

Bright Eyes, Cursive 8 PM, Salt Shed (indoors), 17+

SAT 4/19/2025

Kishi Bashi & Chicago Philharmonic

Orchestra 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre b

FRI 4/25/2025

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, Sneezy 8 PM, the Vic, 18+

SAT 5/3/2025

Flo 8 PM, Salt Shed (indoors) b

MON 5/5/2025

The Cavemen. 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

TUE 5/6/2025

Ichiko Aoba 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

WED 5/7/2025

Ichiko Aoba 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

TUE 5/13/2025

Spellling 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

THU 5/22/2025

Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Sierra Ferrell Wrigley Field b

THU 5/29/2025

Peach Pit, Briston Maroney 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion b

MON 6/30/2025

Tyler, the Creator; Lil Yachty; Paris Texas 7:30 PM, United Center b

TUE 7/1/2025

Tyler, the Creator; Lil Yachty; Paris Texas 7:30 PM, United Center b

FRI 8/29/2025

My Chemical Romance, Devo 6 PM, Soldier Field b

SAT 9/27/2025

Papa Roach, Rise Against, Underoath 7 PM, Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b v

Ichiko Aoba KODAI KOBAYASHI

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Celebrating the LIFE of Ajanae Blessed Bunny Carter Clark 1/6/1110/15/24 Forever Love

Celebrating the LIFE of Anthony Clark 7/31/706/5/22 Forever Friend The Clark Family A/L Always

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

JOBS

IT Professionals (Multiple) Computer Programmers: Write comp.programs to store, locate, retrieve specific docs, data, & info using various techs. Job locns: Aurora, IL & various unanticipated client sites in US req travel & reloc to these sites. Mail resume: Glenysys Technologies Inc 75 Executive Center,#413,Aurora IL,60504. Attar Glenysys Technologies Inc 75 Executive Center,#413,Aurora IL,60504

Medline Industries, LP in Northfield, IL has multi open’gs: A) Sr. Business Systems Analyst(s) to anlyz sys’m change requests, facilitate reqmnts gather’g, manage sftwr dvlpmnt & implemt’n, resolve issues & enhancemnts, & drive process imprvmnt. No trvl req’d. WFH benefit; must be avail to come into office periodically when needed. Apply at: https://medline.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Med line/job/Northfield-Illinois/Sr-Business-Systems-Analyst_R2407039

B) IS Sr. Developer Analyst(s) (RPA) to dvlp robotic process automations (RPA) according to published governance frmwrks & standards. No trvl req’d. WFH beneﬁt; must be in oﬃce at least 2 days/wk. Apply at: https://medline. wd5.myworkdayjobs. com/Med line/job/Northfield-Illinois/Sr-Developer-Analyst_R2406639

Quality Engineer - Implement safety policies; provide stats for quality improvement; analyze data and prep reports by summarizing; analyze info and report results; promote process improvement; devel standards, methods, procedures, equipment; support innovation; assist workers in resolving work problems and ID training needs; determine product/process acceptability within specified tolerances; recommend shutdown based on severity; initiate non-Conforming product containment, comms; maintain quality standards/procedures for calibration of tools, equipment, products; comms w customers, Eng, Mfg, Purchasing, buyers/suppliers re quality; suggest changes in conditions, equipment to increase eﬃciency. Dir inquires to Quantum Plastics, 1000 Davis Rd., Elgin, IL 60123, Attn: D. Andrino, HR.

Supply Chain Analyst in Chicago IL. Must have Bachelor Degree in Supply Chain Management. Work with cross-functional teams to ensure inventory levels are optimized and meet customer demand while minimizing excess and obsolete inventory. Under direction, monitor supplier performance, including lead times, quality, and delivery performance, and work with suppliers to improve performance where necessary. Under direction, Conduct cost analyses to identify opportunities to reduce costs throughout the supply chain, including transportation, inventory carrying costs, and supplier costs. Collaborate with other departments, such as Sales, Operations, and Finance, to ensure alignment on supply chain plans and objectives. Continuously monitor and evaluate supply chain processes and procedures, and recommend improvements to enhance efficiency, quality, and cost-effectiveness. Send resume to: Monda Industrials LLC, 4101 W 42nd Pl, Chicago IL 60632.

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Twinning

Fantasies about my husband’s twin; unmarried 15 years in

By DAN SAVAGE

Q: I might be falling in love with my husband’s identical twin brother.

My husband and I have been in a traditional monogamous cishet straight marriage for 12 years. It wasn’t until the last few years that I started catching feelings for my brother-in-law (BIL), who is also married. I started to notice my BIL in a way that surprised me when we went on a family vacation together. He’s just so empathetic, compassionate, and articulate. He also has the same body my husband does (obviously), although my BIL is little more fit than my husband. What is really hard to understand is that my feelings for my husband haven’t changed.

Do I love them both? Is that possible? Our sex life isn’t suffering. I’ve never been someone who can have orgasms without a vibrator assist, and I’m fine with that. Sometimes though, I find myself thinking about my BIL and feel extremely turned on. When he’s not around I miss him. I’ve even dreamt about the two of us just talking to each other. I feel extremely guilty about this because acting on it would mean betraying everyone I love. Sometimes it’s extremely overwhelming. I find myself watching my BIL and wondering if he feels the same way about me. I think he might—to a degree—but I know neither of us would want to jeopardize our marriages and I would never ask my BIL to jeopardize his relationship with his brother. I also love

my sister-in-law very much. But I can’t help but wonder that in some weird parallel universe maybe I was meant to be with my BIL. I can’t tell anyone about this and I’m desperate to hear what you think. Could I have chosen the wrong twin? I am afraid the only way forward is to just keep quietly loving my BIL and never say anything.

—CRUMBLING RAPIDLY UNDER STUPID HEARTACHE

a: It’s certainly possible to love more than one romantic partner at a time (reference the hundreds of columns I’ve written over the years about polyamory) but it’s not always possible for a particular individual to have more than one romantic partner at a time.

Like, say, someone in a traditional monogamous cishet marriage.

You know what else is possible? It’s possible for a cishet monogamously married person to have one of those run-of-the-mill, all-consuming, life-affirming, harmless crushes on someone they’re not married to. (It’s impossible to have a crush on someone you are married to.) When a married person has one of those run-of-themill (etc.) crushes on someone who isn’t their spouse, CRUSH, it’s not a sign (at least, not all by itself) that there’s something wrong with their marriage. Even happily married people sometimes fantasize about alternative timelines where they’re married to someone else, e.g., that friendly coworker, that hot barista, or

that unattainable movie star instead of the person waiting for them at home.

But when the object of a crush is someone explosively inappropriate . . . when disclosure of the crush would create a blast radius so wide nothing for miles could possibly survive . . . that crush can best be understood as a kind of death wish. In other words, CRUSH, sometimes a crush is just a crush and sometimes a crush is a manifestation of a subconscious desire to blow it all up.

What can be done about a death-wish crush? Nothing. All you can do—if you don’t wanna blow it all up—is wait it out, same as you would one of those harmless crushes. It might take a few weeks or months . . . or it might take the rest of your life . . . but crushes (death-wish or otherwise), like everything else, don’t last forever.

P.S. I see two upsides to this death-wish crush of yours, CRUSH, given your particular and highly unique circumstances. First, if your husband ever finds out you have a crush on his brother—and here’s hoping he never does—it’s not like you have a crush on his physical opposite. Unlike a woman with brown hair who realizes her husband is crushing on a blonde, your husband won’t have to worry that he isn’t your type. And if, like most married people, you sometimes fantasize about other people while you’re having sex with your spouse, CRUSH, you won’t have to close your eyes to picture your crush instead of your

SAVAGE LOVE

husband. You won’t even have to squint.

Q: I’m a 36-year-old cis woman and I’ve been with my boyfriend for just over 15 years. We’re generally happy and we have a great and very active sex life. We’re monogamous, kind to each other, and we spend a lot of time together. The thing is, we’ve never gotten married. I made it clear at diﬀerent points in our relationship that I was open to it, but he’s always been against it. He says that he just doesn’t see the point. It’s never been something I dreamt about, but I ﬁgured we’d get around to it eventually. Lately I’ve been feeling more and more like the fact that we haven’t gotten married yet is an indicator that something is deeply wrong with our relationship. He’s not antimarriage. He’s gotten choked up during the vows at every wedding we’ve ever been to. So now, 15 years in, I fear it’s not marriage he doesn’t want—it’s me.

Other context: I come from a very broken family (abusive home, two siblings died from drugs and/or suicide, I’m estranged from nearly everyone else), and I’ve always felt that no matter how great my life might seem outwardly, deep down

I’m radioactive because of where I came from. I’m also the primary earner in our house, with a very good income. He’s in a creative field and I’ve bankrolled our life together. I’ve been happy to do it. That said, his entire family is super weird about money, and I watched his sister marry and divorce an absolute troll because he was loaded. I’ve got no interest in giving him an ultimatum. Talking about it can’t change how he feels deep down towards me. What do I do? —RELATIONSHIP ISN’T NEARING GOAL

a: If you want to and are ready to marry this man, stop waiting for him to pop the question and pop it yourself already.

While a person can fake wanting to fuck you and/ or spend time with you, a person can only fake that shit for so long. So, based on your description of your relationship, RING, I’d say your boyfriend genuinely loves you. If he was only interested in your earning power and willingness to subsidize his artistic endeavors, boredom, and/or resentment would’ve creeped in around the edges years ago. And think about it: if your boyfriend didn’t love you and was only after your

money, he would’ve proposed to you, married you, and divorced you a long time ago. Again, if you’re still getting wanna fuck/wanna hang vibes from him 15 years in, odds are good they’re genuine.

And the world is full of happily married men and women who didn’t think marriage was for them, i.e., men and women only agreed to marry because it was what their spouses wanted. In some cases, these reluctant to marry but now happily married types only had to be asked once, RING, but in others, the partner that wanted marriage had to issue a shit-or-get-off-myface ultimatum: we’re getting married or we’re going our separate ways. There’s always a risk, of course, that a reluctant-to-marry or doesn’t-see-the-point type partner will pick the second option—and end the relationship—but you can’t get what you want without making demands. And if he can’t have you without marrying you, RING, suddenly marriage has a point, right?

And if he refuses to marry you—if he refuses your ultimatum—you have the option of backing down.

P.S. When people hear “creative,” they usually think “extrovert.” But not all creatives are extroverts. If your boyfriend is a behind-thescenes creative (writer, composer, illustrator) as opposed to a front-and-center creative (actor, singer, contortionist), he may dread the idea of being the center of attention—and the bride and groom at a big wedding are the center of a crushing amount of attention. So, if your boyfriend is an introvert, make it clear to him that it’s marriage you want, RING, not a big wedding. v

Full column archives and more at the URL savage. love. m mailbox@savage.love

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

JOHN AKOMFRAH

Four Nocturnes

Organized by the Rubin Museum of Art Celebrating its 20th Anniversary

 IMAGE CREDIT: Shushank Shrestha; Male Guardian Lion Dog (one of a pair from Two Guardian Lion Dogs); 2023; ceramic, in glaze lustre; 52×27×44 in.; photo courtesy of Shuhank Shrestha, Massachusetts, USA.

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

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

 IMAGE CREDITS: (TOP) © John Akomfrah; Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. John Akomfrah: Four Nocturnes, 2019. Three channel HD colour video installation, 7.1 sound, 50 minutes. (AKOM190001). (BOTTOM) © John Akomfrah; Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Film and Lisson Galler y. John Akomfrah: Four Nocturnes 2019. Three channel HD colour video installation, 7.1 sound, 50 minutes. Installed in The Unintended Beauty of Disaster, Lisson Gallery, London, 2021.